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arXiv · 2311.09645

PELS: A Lightweight and Flexible Peripheral Event Linking System for Ultra-Low Power IoT Processors

Alessandro Ottaviano·Robert Balas·Philippe Sauter·Manuel Eggimann·Luca Benini
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Abstract

A key challenge for ultra-low-power (ULP) devices is handling peripheral linking, where the main central processing unit (CPU) periodically mediates the interaction among multiple peripherals following wake-up events. Current solutions address this problem by either integrating event interconnects that route single-wire event lines among peripherals or by general-purpose I/O processors, with a strong trade-off between the latency, efficiency of the former, and the flexibility of the latter. In this paper, we present an open-source, peripheral-agnostic, lightweight, and flexible Peripheral Event Linking System (PELS) that combines dedicated event routing with a tiny I/O processor. With the proposed approach, the power consumption of a linking event is reduced by 2.5 times compared to a baseline relying on the main core for the event-linking process, at a low area of just 7 kGE in its minimal configuration, when integrated into a ULP RISC-V IoT processor.

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Alessandro Ottaviano, Robert Balas, Philippe Sauter, Manuel Eggimann, Luca Benini. 2023-11-16. PELS: A Lightweight and Flexible Peripheral Event Linking System for Ultra-Low Power IoT Processors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09645

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