The IEEE Low-Voltage Low-Power conference 2013 will be held in Paris on June 19-21. Three papers from ICTEAM researchers will be presented there. This seminar of the UCL IEEE Student Branch is intended to give a preview of the presentations in these 3 fields: Networks-on-Chip by François Stas (ELME22M), Ultra-wide-band receiver by Mohamad Al Kadi Jazairli (Ph.D student) and Green Systems-on-a-chip for the Internet-of-Things by Pr. David Bol.
François Stas, Angelo Kuti Lusala, Jean-Didier Legat and David Bol: “Investigation of the Routing algorithm in a De Bruijn-based NoC for Low-Power Applications”.
The De Bruijn topology, due to its interesting features such as a small minimal path, a small average latency and a small average number of hops, is a promising alternative topology to mesh-based NoCs for low-power applications. However, these advantages strongly depend on the efficiency of the routing algorithm in presence of congestion. This paper investigates efficient implementations of routing algorithms in NoCs based on the De Bruijn topology. Four routing algorithms are proposed and evaluated for NoCs up to 64 nodes. Simulation results show that combining FIFO buffers and Deviation Priority in the General Shifting based Routing Algorithm “GSRA” leads to the best performances. With the proposed routing algorithm, the De Bruijn-based NoCs up to 64 nodes are shown to keep excellent communication bandwidth and latency with packet injection rates above 10%. The average number of hops is significantly smaller than for corresponding mesh-based NoC, thereby making the De Bruijn topology an excellent candidate for low-power applications.
Mohamad Al Kadi Jazairli, Denis Flandre, “An Ultra-Low-Power UWB IR pulse receiver using 65nm CMOS technology”.
This paper presents an ultra-low-power receiver for low data rate and short distance IR-UWB pulses. A non-coherent architecture allows the implementation of low-power and low-complexity receiver. The LNA is designed to enable switching between two gain modes. The designed LNA can achieve up to 8dB voltage gain. The energy detector is implemented using three stages: a squarer, an envelope detector and a comparator. The total power consumption of the LNA and the energy detector is less than 0.7mW at 1V supply voltage.
David Bol, Julien De Vos, François Botman, Guerric de Streel, Sébastien Bernard, Denis Flandre and Jean-Didier Legat, “Green SoCs for a Sustainable Internet-of-Things” (keynote).
The vision of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) calls for the deployment of trillions of wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) in our environment. A sustainable deployment of such a large number of electronic systems needs to be addressed with a Design-for-the-Environment approach. This requires minimizing 1) the embodied energy and carbon footprint of the WSN production, 2) the ecotoxicity of the WSN e-waste, and 3) the Internet traffic associated to the generated data. In this paper, we study how ultra-low-power yet high-performance systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) in nanometer CMOS technologies can contribute to these objectives by allowing compact batteryless WSNs with on-node data processing. We then review latest results achieved at the Université catholique de Louvain in the field of green SoC design for a massive yet sustainable deployment of the IoT.