Title: Variability-Aware Design for Energy Efficient Computational Artificial Intelligence Platform,
Abstract: Portable computing devices, which include tablets, smart phones and various
types of wearable sensors, experienced a rapid development in recent years. One
of the most critical limitations for these devices is the power consumption as
they use batteries as the power supply. However, the bottleneck of the power
saving schemes in both hardware design and software algorithm is the huge
variability in power consumption. The variability is caused by a myriad of
factors, including the manufacturing process, the ambient environment
(temperature, humidity), the aging effects and etc. As the technology node
scaled down to 28nm and even lower, the variability becomes more severe. As a
result, a platform for variability characterization seems to be very necessary
and helpful.