An Energy-Efficiency Biomedical Signal Processing Platform

This chip is intended as a processor on a wearable medical monitoring sensor node, which continuously analyzes a subject's vital signs. In addition to a 16-bit general-purpose CPU, the chip leverages custom hardware accelerators to reduce the energy needed for common signal processing in biomedical applications. Voltage scaling and module-level power gating allow the chip to adapt to different applications with varied performance/processing demands. While running two published EEG and EKG analysis applications, the processor achieved > 10× energy reduction compared to a general-purpose low power CPU.