A 10-pJ/instruction, 4-MIPS micropower DSP for sensor applications

Abstract

We describe a micropower DSP intended for medium bandwidth microsensor applications (such as acoustic sensing and tracking) which achieves 4 MIPS performance at 40 muW (10 pJ per instruction). Architectural optimizations for energy efficiency include a custom CPU instruction set, miniature instruction cache, hardware accelerator cores for FIR filter and FFT operations, and extensive power gating of both logic and memory.