AI/DSP-IP

The Ecosystem microcontroller is a PULPissimo-based microcontroller featuring the following Scale4Edge ecosystem IPs:

• A RISC-V TGC processor core
• The AI hardware accelerator UltraTrail
• A phase-locked loop (PLL)

Due to the high configurability of the individual components, the platform can be quickly and easily adapted to specific applications. A specialized ecosystem microcontroller was taped-out in 22nm FDSOI technology as a demonstrator for an audio event detection use-case provided by the project partner Bosch.

UltraTrail is a configurable hardware accelerator for real-time inference of temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) on edge devices. Designed for near-sensor signal processing on energy-constrained platforms it features an optimized dataflow for one-dimensional convolution with a total power consumption in the low microwatt range. The parameterizable architecture combined with a hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) allows an automatic generation of domain-specific accelerator instances. Accurate models for power, performance, and area enable a fast design-space exploration.