Hand-sized Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing machines are of growing importance in several life sciences fields as their small footprints enable a broader range of use cases than their larger, stationary counterparts. However, as currently designed, they lack sufficient embedded computing to process the large volume of measurements generated by their internal sensory system. As a consequence, they rely on external devices for additional processing capability. This dependence on external processing places a significant communication burden on the sequencer's embedded electronics. Moreover, it also prevents a truly mobile solution for sequencing in real-time. Anticipating next-generation machines that include suitably advanced processing, we present a System-on-Chip (SoC) fabricated in 22-nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS). Our design, based on a general-purpose reduced instruction set computing (RISC-V) core, also includes accelerators for DNA detection that allow our system to demonstrate a 13X performance improvement over commercial embedded multicore processors combined with a near 3000X boost in energy efficiency.

翻译：手持式脱氧核糖核酸（DNA）测序仪因其体积小巧，相比大型固定设备能适用于更广泛的应用场景，在多个生命科学领域的重要性日益凸显。然而，现有设计普遍缺乏足够的嵌入式计算能力，难以处理其内部传感系统产生的大量测量数据。因此，这些设备需要依赖外部设备提供额外的处理能力。这种对外部处理的依赖性给测序仪的嵌入式电子系统带来了沉重的通信负担，同时也阻碍了实现真正可实时操作的移动测序解决方案。为满足下一代测序仪对先进处理能力的需求，本文提出一款采用22纳米互补金属氧化物半导体（CMOS）工艺制造的片上系统。该设计基于通用精简指令集计算（RISC-V）核心，并集成了DNA检测专用加速器。实验表明，与商用嵌入式多核处理器相比，本系统性能提升达13倍，同时能效比提升近3000倍。