June 17, 2021

AI system-on-chip runs on solar power

CSEM engineers have developed an integrated circuit that can carry out complicated artificial-intelligence operations like face, voice and gesture recognition and cardiac monitoring. Powered by either a tiny battery or a solar panel, it processes data at the edge and can be configured for use in just about any type of application

Face
System-on-chip

The CSEM system-on-chip works through an entirely new signal processing architecture that minimizes the amount of power needed. It consists of an ASIC chip with a RISC-V processor (also developed at CSEM) and two tightly coupled machine-learning accelerators: one for face detection, for example, and one for classification. The first is a binary decision tree (BDT) engine that can perform simple tasks but cannot carry out recognition operations.

Convolutional neural network

The second accelerator is a convolutional neural network (CNN) engine that can perform these more complicated tasks – recognizing individual faces and detecting specific words – but it also consumes more energy. This two-tiered data processing approach drastically reduces the system’s power requirement, since most of the time only the first accelerator is running.

As part of their research, the engineers enhanced the performance of the accelerators themselves, making them adaptable to any application where time-based signal and image processing is needed.