Title :
Low Power Reconfigurable Controllers for Wireless Sensor Network Nodes
Author :
Tovinakere, Vivek D. ; Sentieys, Olivier ; Derrien, Steven ; Huriaux, Christophe
Author_Institution :
NVIDIA Corp., Bangalore, India
Abstract :
A key concern in the design of controllers in wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes is the flexibility to execute different control tasks involving sensing, communications and computational resources of the node. In this paper, low power flexible controllers for WSN nodes based on reconfigurable microtasks composed of an FSM and datapath are presented. Coarse grain power gating opportunities are exploited in FSM and datapath for low power operation in reconfigurable microtasks. Power estimation results on typical benchmark microtasks show a 2× to 5× improvement in energy efficiency w.r.t a microcontroller at a cost of 5× relative to a microtask implemented as an ASIC with higher NRE costs.
Keywords :
application specific integrated circuits; energy conservation; finite state machines; microcontrollers; wireless sensor networks; ASIC; FSM; NRE; WSN; application-specific integrated circuit; coarse grain power gating; energy efficiency; finite state machine; low power reconfigurable controller; microcontroller; power estimation; reconfigurable microtask; wireless sensor network node; Adders; Microcontrollers; Registers; Sensors; Table lookup; Wireless sensor networks; Low power; microcontrollers; power gating; reconfigurable hardware; wireless sensor networks;
Conference_Titel :
Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2014 IEEE 22nd Annual International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Boston, MA
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4799-5110-9
DOI :
10.1109/FCCM.2014.68