Design of Low-Power SoC for Wearable Healthcare Device

Abstract

In wearable devices, power consumption is a serious issue since wearable devices must maintain the power-on state at any time. In healthcare system, a variety of signal processing operations occupy a large portion of overall workload because it has periodic and heavy computational workloads. In this paper, we propose a low-power System on Chip (SoC) architecture for wearable healthcare devices. In order to reduce power consumption of processor, we design a hardware accelerator that handles signal processing and provides computation offloading. Furthermore, to minimize the area and maximize the performance of the accelerator, we optimize the operation bit-width by analyzing the frequency response. The low-power healthcare SoC was fabricated with 0.11[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m CMOS process. Finally, we measured the power consumption of our chip and verified the applicability of the digital filter accelerator, which reduces the energy consumption for embedded processor.