An IoT Endpoint System-on-Chip for Secure and Energy-Efficient Near-Sensor Analytics

TL;DR

This paper introduces Fulmine, a low-power, secure IoT System-on-Chip designed for near-sensor analytics, combining energy efficiency with data security through integrated encryption and specialized processing blocks.

Contribution

The paper presents Fulmine, a novel energy-efficient, secure SoC with integrated encryption and processing capabilities tailored for IoT near-sensor analytics applications.

Findings

Achieves less than 20mW power consumption at 0.8V

Supports encryption at 70pJ/B efficiency

Demonstrates secure analytics in three real-world use cases

Abstract

Near-sensor data analytics is a promising direction for IoT endpoints, as it minimizes energy spent on communication and reduces network load - but it also poses security concerns, as valuable data is stored or sent over the network at various stages of the analytics pipeline. Using encryption to protect sensitive data at the boundary of the on-chip analytics engine is a way to address data security issues. To cope with the combined workload of analytics and encryption in a tight power envelope, we propose Fulmine, a System-on-Chip based on a tightly-coupled multi-core cluster augmented with specialized blocks for compute-intensive data processing and encryption functions, supporting software programmability for regular computing tasks. The Fulmine SoC, fabricated in 65nm technology, consumes less than 20mW on average at 0.8V achieving an efficiency of up to 70pJ/B in encryption, 50pJ/px in convolution, or up to 25MIPS/mW in software. As a strong argument for real-life flexible application of our platform, we show experimental results for three secure analytics use cases: secure autonomous aerial surveillance with a state-of-the-art deep CNN consuming 3.16pJ per equivalent RISC op; local CNN-based face detection with secured remote recognition in 5.74pJ/op; and seizure detection with encrypted data collection from EEG within 12.7pJ/op.