7MOPS/lemon-battery image processing demonstration with an ultra-low power reconfigurable accelerator CMA-SOTB-2

Cool Mega Array (CMA)-SOTB-2 is an ultra-low energy Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Architecture[1] (CGRA) for recent advanced sensor networks, Internet of Things and wearable computing. It has a large Processing Element (PE) array without memory elements for mapping an application´s data-flow graph, a small simple programmable μ-controller for data management, and data memory. Unlike traditional coarse grained reconfigurable processors, the power consumption for hardware context switching, storing intermediate data in registers, and clock distribution for them are eliminated from PE array which occupies large area of a chip. It is implemented by using Silicon on Thin BOX (SOTB) CMOS, a new process technology developed by the Low-power Electronics Association & Project (LEAP).