Revisiting Simple and Energy Efficient Embedded Processor Designs Toward the Edge Computing

摘要

As interest in architectural designs for "Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing" is growing, conflicting requirements between energy-efficiency and design-productivity are becoming remarkably crucial. Owing to the increasing diversity of IoT applications, the domain-oriented designs of processors should be reassessed. By focusing on one application domain that is control-intensive and mainly operates "light" computations, we examine issues of current processor designs, present simple and energy-efficient processors, and justify the design strategies that we employed. Our evaluation shows the effectiveness of our processors, in terms of circuit area and energy-efficiency, over ARM Cortex-M0, and reveals important findings in architectural designs for severely constrained IoT edge computing.