An energy-efficient heterogeneous dual-core processor for Internet of Things

With the fast development of Internet of Things (IoTs) in recent years, many IoT applications, such as structure health monitoring, surveillance camera and etc, require both extensive computation for burst-mode signal processing as well as ultra low power continuous operations. However, most of conventional IoT processors focus on ultra low power consumption and cannot satisfy those demands. This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient heterogenous dual-core processor, which includes both an ultra low power near-threshold CoreL and a fast CoreH to meet those emerging requirements. Furthermore, an optimal framework is proposed to realize energy efficient task mapping and scheduling. The processor is fabricated and its energy consumption in low power mode is as low as 7.7pJ/cycle and outperforms related work. Detailed analysis under several real applications shows that up to 2.62× energy efficiency improvements can be achieved without deadline miss compared with the high-performance-only signle core architecture.