A Scalable RISC-V Hardware Platform for Intelligent Sensor Processing

This paper presents a demonstrator chip for an industrial audio event detection application developed as part of the Scale4Edge project. The project aims at enabling a comprehensive RISC-V based ecosystem to efficiently assemble well-tailored edge devices. The chip is manufactured in Globalfoundries' 22FDX technology and contains a RISC-V CPU with custom Instruction-Set-Architecture Extensions (ISAX) for fast AI and DSP processing, a low power neural network accelerator, and a scalable PLL to fulfill real-time processing requirements. By automated integration of these specialized hardware components, we achieve a speedup of ×2.15 while reducing the power by 27% compared to the unp[ntimized solution.