Ultra-Low Power AI Chip Ups the Ante

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Ultra-Low Power AI Chip Ups the Ante

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GreenWaves tweaks architecture, uses FD-SOI to cut power by 5x
LONDON – The next generation of GreenWaves’ ultra-low power AI accelerator, GAP9, will use five times less power than its predecessor, GAP8, while handling algorithms that are 10x bigger.
The new device will offer up to 50 GOPS at an overall power consumption of 50mW.
This is down to a combination of architectural improvements and a new state-of-the-art FD-SOI (fully depleted silicon on insulator) process technology.
Like the previous generation device, GAP9 is aimed at AI inferencing in systems at the very edge of the network, such as small, battery-powered eetimes.com/designline/internet-of-things-designline/”>IoT sensor nodes.
As an example, GreenWaves’ figures have GAP9 running MobileNet V1 on 160 x 160 images with a channel scaling of 0.25 in just 12ms with a power consumption of 806 μW/frame/second.
GreenWaves, based in Grenoble, France, has chosen GlobalFoundries’ 22nm FDX FD-SOI process to minimise the power consumption of what was already an ultra-low power architecture.
“For GAP9, we’ve tuned the GAP8 architecture using customer feedback on GAP8, but at the same time we’ve moved to a market-leading semiconductor process,” said Martin Croome, vice president of marketing at GreenWaves.
“We are using the body biasing ability in FD-SOI to allow us to achieve even lower power consumption.”
GreenWaves has made several architectural advancements for GAP9.
“This [memory bandwidth] is now very significant for an MCU-class device,” Croome said.
Changes to the GAP9 architecture also include a much higher top frequency; GAP8 clocked in at 175MHz, GAP9 will run at or close to 400MHz. New power states have also been added, including a “dozy” state when data can be acquired but the power consumption is still under 1 mW.
This brings GAP9’s time to first instruction down to just a few microseconds (GAP8 took around 700 µs while it waited for the DC-DC converter to stabilise, Croome said)

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