A 1GHz hardware loop-accelerator with razor-based dynamic adaptation for energy-efficient operation

We describe the implementation and silicon measurement results from a Razor-based hardware loop-accelerator (RZLA), implementing the Sobel edge-detection algorithm. We demonstrate robust operation with a large Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) range achieved using 50% of the clock-period for timing-speculation. At 1GHz operating frequency, Razor DVS enables 34% energy-efficiency improvement on a per-device basis and 33% overall on the entire batch of devices.