Energy profile of a microcontroller for neural prosthetic application

Author

Kellis, Spencer ; Gaskin, Nathaniel ; Redd, Bennion ; Campbell, Jeff ; Brown, Richard

Author_Institution

Dept of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

fYear

2010

fDate

May 30 2010-June 2 2010

Firstpage

3841

Lastpage

3844

Abstract

A third-generation microcontroller has been designed to operate as a control element in an embedded wireless neural interface system. This design was fabricated in the IBM 65nm CMOS process. We present an analysis of the energy profile of the fabricated microcontroller by measuring the energy to execute each family of instructions. We also investigate the efficiency of new instructions for block transfers. Finally, we discuss implications of these results for energy-efficient operation. The fabricated chip is operational at up to 150MHz. With a core power supply of 0.8V, the chip consumes 350uW at 10MHz. The new block transfer instructions are as much as 44% more efficient than traditional load-store sequences for saving registers to memory, and up to 15% more efficient when transferring 16-byte chunks of data.

Keywords

biomedical engineering; microcontrollers; neural nets; prosthetics; IBM 65nm CMOS process; block transfer instructions; embedded wireless neural interface system; frequency 10 MHz; frequency 150 MHz; microcontroller energy profile; neural prosthetic application; power 350 muW; third generation microcontroller; voltage 0.8 V; CMOS process; Energy efficiency; Hardware; Memory architecture; Microcontrollers; Pipelines; Power supplies; Prosthetics; Random access memory; Registers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Paris

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5308-5

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-5309-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISCAS.2010.5537715

Filename

5537715