TamaRISC-CS: An ultra-low-power application-specific processor for compressed sensing

Compressed sensing (CS) is a universal technique for the compression of sparse signals. CS has been widely used in sensing platforms where portable, autonomous devices have to operate for long periods of time with limited energy resources. Therefore, an ultra-low-power (ULP) CS implementation is vital for these kind of energy-limited systems. Sub-threshold (sub-V
T
) operation is commonly used for ULP computing, and can also be combined with CS. However, most established CS implementations can achieve either no or very limited benefit from sub-V
T
operation. Therefore, we propose a sub-V
T
application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP), exploiting the specific operations of CS. Our results show that the proposed ASIP accomplishes 62x speed-up and 11.6x power savings with respect to an established CS implementation running on the baseline low-power processor.