NeRF-Navi: A 93.6-202.9µJ/task Switchable Approximate-Accurate NeRF Path Planning Processor with Dual Attention Engine and Outlier Bit-Offloading Core

A neural radiance field-based path planning (NeRF-PP) processor, NeRF-Navi, is proposed for accurate, fast and energy-efficient 3D navigation with 3 key features: 1) dual attention neural path sampling (DANPS) engine for energy-efficient NeRF-PP acceleration, 2) approximate-accurate (A²) core with error-compensable reduction tree (ECRT) and bit sparsity boosting logic (BSBL) for low power computation, 3) outlier channel bit-offloading core (OCBOC) for low-latency. NeRF-Navi is fabricated in a 28nm CMOS process and evaluated in 3D real-world maps. As a result, the fabricated NeRF -Navi processor successfully demonstrates real-time NeRF-PP on edge devices consuming only 93.6-202.9µJ/task with 0.57-1.39 ms latency at 1.1V and 200MHz.