Power-Performance Verification of Ultra-Low-Power Data-Driven Networking Processor: ULP-CUE

Ultra-low-power protocol handling is indispensable to realize and sustain the communication in ad hoc network established by battery-operated devices, especially in emergent situations. To realize the ultra-low-power, real-time multiprocessing essential for the protocol handling should be realized with essential power consumption in which power consumption is confined into only target program execution. In this paper, a data-driven processor, named ULP-CUE, is proposed to realize the real-time multiprocessing with the essential power consumption. The ULP-CUE is fully realized by self-timed elastic pipeline which consumes power only for circuits contributing processing as a result of localized and exclusive data transfer, and its instruction execution pipeline is designed to transfer data to only stages essential for executing instructions. The power-performance evaluation with a prototype LSI shows that the proposed ULP-CUE can work with approximately 40% of energy consumption compared to the conventional implementations of the realtime multiprocessing.