Efficient Design of Variation-Resilient Ultra-Low Energy Digital Processors [Hardcover]

This book enables readers to achieve ultra-low energy digital system performance.  The authors main focus is the energy consumption of microcontroller architectures in digital (sub)-systems.  The book covers a broad range of topics extensively: from circuits through design strategy to system architectures. The result is a set of techniques and a context to realize minimum energy digital systems. Several prototype silicon implementations are discussed, which put the proposed techniques to the test. The achieved results demonstrate an extraordinary combination of variation-resilience, high speed performance and ultra-low energy.

Chapter 1. Energy-Efficient Processors: Challenges and Solutions.- Chapter 2. Near-Threshold Operation: Technology, Building Blocks and Architecture.- Chapter 3. Efficient VLSI Design Flow.- Chapter 4. Ultra-Low Voltage Microcontrollers.- Chapter 5. Error Detection and Correction.- Chapter 6. Timing Error-Aware Microcontroller.- Chapter 7. Conclusion.

Hans Reyserhove was born in Turnhout, Belgium in 1989. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees cum laude in engineering science, electrical engineering from KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 2010 and 2012. The topic of his master thesis was A pixel level ADC for extreme parallelism, high frame rate and high dynamic range image sensors . In 2011, he interned at the NCTU Si2Lab, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He is currently working as a research assistant at the ESAT- MICAS laboratories of the KU Leuven towards a Ph.D. degree in the field of near-threshold digital circuit design with a focus on automating design flows, standard cell design, microprocessors and better-than-worst-case design techniques. The promoter of his Ph.D. is Prof. Dr. Ir. Wim Dehaene. His main research interests are local and energy-efficient compute, low voltage operation, microprocessors and better-than-worst-case design techniques.