IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Monterey, CA, May 21-25, 2023.
Graham Gobieski, Oguz Atli, Cagri Erbagci, Ken Mai, Nathan Beckmann, Brandon Lucia
Carnegie Mellon University
Whether powered by a battery or energy harvested from the environment, low-power (LP) sensor devices require extreme energy efficiency. These sorts of devices are becoming pervasive, running increasingly sophisticated applications in inhospitable environments. We present MANIC, an energy-efficient microcontroller (MCU) augmented with a vector-dataflow (VDF) co-processor. The testchip taped out on a 22nm bulk finFET CMOS process demonstrates that MANIC is 60% more energyefficient than a baseline, scalar, low-power MCU, achieving peak efficiency of 256 MOPS/mW (2.6 prior work) while consuming only 19.1μW (@4MHz). To make the system viable for intermittently powered applications that require non-volatile storage, MANIC includes a 256KB embedded MRAM.
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