An Energy-Efficient Low-Voltage Swing Transceiver for mW-Range IoT End-Nodes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a complete, energy-efficient low-voltage swing transceiver integrated into IoT end-node processors, significantly improving bandwidth and power consumption over traditional interfaces for near-sensor analytics.

Contribution

It presents the first system-level design of a low-voltage swing transceiver integrated within low-power IoT processors, demonstrating substantial performance and energy efficiency gains.

Findings

Achieves 10.2x higher energy efficiency than traditional microcontroller interfaces.

Provides 15.7x higher performance in a single lane.

Successfully integrates the transceiver into a real IoT system.

Abstract

As the Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications become more and more pervasive, IoT end nodes are requiring more and more computational power within a few mW of power envelope, coupled with high-speed and energy-efficient inter-chip communication to deal with the growing input/output and memory bandwidth for emerging near-sensor analytics applications. While traditional interfaces such as SPI cannot cope with these tight requirements, low-voltage swing transceivers can tackle this challenge thanks to their capability to achieve several Gbps of bandwidth at extremely low power. However, recent research on high-speed serial links addressed this challenge only partially, proposing only partial or stand-alone designs, and not addressing their integration in real systems and the related implications. In this paper, we present for the first time a complete design and system-level architecture of a low-voltage swing transceiver integrated within a low-power (mW range) IoT end-node processors, and we compare it with existing microcontroller interfaces. The transceiver, implemented in a commercial 65-nm CMOS technology achieves 10.2x higher energy efficiency at 15.7x higher performance than traditional microcontroller peripherals (single lane).