SPJan 13
Bio-RV: Low-Power Resource-Efficient RISC-V Processor for Biomedical ApplicationsVijay Pratap Sharma, Annu Kumar, Mohd Faisal Khan et al.
This work presents Bio-RV, a compact and resource-efficient RISC-V processor intended for biomedical control applications, such as accelerator-based biomedical SoCs and implantable pacemaker systems. The proposed Bio-RV is a multi-cycle RV32I core that provides explicit execution control and external instruction loading with capabilities that enable controlled firmware deployment, ASIC bring-up, and post-silicon testing. In addition to coordinating accelerator configuration and data transmission in heterogeneous systems, Bio-RV is designed to function as a lightweight host controller, handling interfaces with pacing, sensing, electrogram (EGM), telemetry, and battery management modules. With 708 LUTs and 235 flip-flops on FPGA prototypes, Bio-RV, implemented in a 180 nm CMOS technology, operate at 50 MHz and feature a compact hardware footprint. According to post-layout results, the proposed architectural decisions align with minimal energy use. Ultimately, Bio-RV prioritises deterministic execution, minimal hardware complexity, and integration flexibility over peak computing speed to meet the demands of ultra-low-power, safety-critical biomedical systems.
ARFeb 22
CORVET: A CORDIC-Powered, Resource-Frugal Mixed-Precision Vector Processing Engine for High-Throughput AIoT applicationsSonu Kumar, Mohd Faisal Khan, Mukul Lokhande et al.
This brief presents a runtime-adaptive, performance-enhanced vector engine featuring a low-resource, iterative CORDIC-based MAC unit for edge AI acceleration. The proposed design enables dynamic reconfiguration between approximate and accurate modes, exploiting the latency-accuracy trade-off for a wide range of workloads. Its resource-efficient approach further enables up to 4x throughput improvement within the same hardware resources by leveraging vectorised, time-multiplexed execution and flexible precision scaling. With a time-multiplexed multi-AF block and a lightweight pooling and normalisation unit, the proposed vector engine supports flexible precision (4/8/16-bit) and high MAC density. The ASIC implementation results show that each MAC stage can save up to 33% of time and 21% of power, with a 256-PE configuration that achieves higher compute density (4.83 TOPS/mm2 ) and energy efficiency (11.67 TOPS/W) than previous state-of-the-art work. A detailed hardware-software co-design methodology for object detection and classification tasks on Pynq-Z2 is discussed to assess the proposed architecture, demonstrating a scalable, energy-efficient solution for edge AI applications.