An Energy Efficient Full-Frame Feature Extraction Accelerator With Shift-Latch FIFO in 28 nm CMOS

This paper presents an energy-efficient feature extraction accelerator design aimed at visual navigation. The hardware-oriented algorithmic modifications such as a circular-shaped sampling region and unified description are proposed to minimize area and energy consumption while maintaining feature extraction quality. A matched-throughput accelerator employs fully-unrolled filters and single-stream descriptor enabled by algorithm-architecture co-optimization, which requires lower clock frequency for the given throughput requirement and reduces hardware cost of description processing elements. Due to the large number of FIFO blocks, a robust low-power FIFO architecture for the ultra-low voltage (ULV) regime is also proposed. This approach leverages shift-latch delay elements and balanced-leakage readout technique to achieve 62% energy savings and 37% delay reduction. We apply these techniques to a feature extraction accelerator that can process 30 fps VGA video in real time and is fabricated in 28 nm LP CMOS technology. The design consumes 2.7 mW with a clock frequency of 27 MHz at V_dd = 470 mV, providing 3.5× better energy efficiency than previous state-of-the-art while extracting features from entire image.