The field of edge computing has witnessed remarkable growth owing to the increasing demand for real-time processing of data in applications. However, challenges persist due to limitations in performance and power consumption. To overcome these challenges, heterogeneous architectures have emerged that combine host processors with specialized accelerators tailored to specific applications, leading to improved performance and reduced power consumption. However, most of the existing platforms lack the necessary configurability and extendability options for integrating custom accelerators. To overcome these limitations, we introduce in this paper the eXtendible Heterogeneous Energy-Efficient Platform (X-HEEP). X-HEEP is an open-source platform designed to natively support the integration of ultra-low-power edge accelerators. It provides customization options to match specific application requirements by exploring various core types, bus topologies, addressing modes, memory sizes, and peripherals. Moreover, the platform prioritizes energy efficiency by implementing low-power strategies, such as clock-gating and power-gating. We demonstrate the real-world applicability of X-HEEP by providing an integration example tailored for healthcare applications that includes a coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) and in-memory computing (IMC) accelerators. The resulting design, called HEEPocrates, has been implemented both in field programmable gate array (FPGA) on the Xilinx Zynq-7020 chip and in silicon with TSMC 65nm low-power CMOS technology. We run a set of healthcare applications and measure their energy consumption to demonstrate the alignment of our chip with other state-of-the-art microcontrollers commonly adopted in this domain. Moreover, we present the energy benefits of 4.9x and 4.8x gained by exploiting the integrated CGRA and IMC accelerators compared to running on the host CPU.

翻译：边缘计算领域因应用中对数据实时处理需求的增长而取得了显著进展。然而，性能和功耗的限制仍然带来挑战。为克服这些挑战，异构架构应运而生，它将主处理器与针对特定应用定制的专用加速器相结合，从而提升性能并降低功耗。然而，现有多数平台缺乏集成自定义加速器所需的必要可配置性和可扩展性选项。为解决这些限制，本文提出了可扩展异构高能效平台（X-HEEP）。X-HEEP是一种开源平台，原生支持超低功耗边缘加速器的集成。它通过探索多种核心类型、总线拓扑、寻址模式、内存大小及外设，提供定制选项以满足特定应用需求。此外，该平台通过实施时钟门控和电源门控等低功耗策略，优先实现能效优化。我们通过一个面向医疗应用（包含粗粒度可重构阵列CGRA和存内计算IMC加速器）的集成示例，展示了X-HEEP的实际适用性。该最终设计名为HEEPocrates，已在Xilinx Zynq-7020芯片的现场可编程门阵列FPGA上实现，并采用台积电65nm低功耗CMOS工艺流片。我们运行了一组医疗应用并测量其能耗，以证明本芯片与该领域常用的其他先进微控制器性能相当。此外，与在主CPU上运行相比，利用集成的CGRA和IMC加速器分别获得了4.9倍和4.8倍的能效提升。