Ultra-low-power dual-phase latch based digital accelerator for continuous monitoring of wheezing episodes

Abstract

We designed an ultra-low-power accelerator for the calculation of the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) optimized for wheezing detection. The low power consumption of our accelerator relies on optimizations at different stages of the design process. Post-layout simulations show that at the minimum energy point our accelerator consumes 3.3 pJ/cycle at 0.5 V and 163 KHz. We compare the energy consumption of our implementation with its flip-flop version. Simulations show that we can save up to 50% in energy consumption for a latch based design vs. a flip-flop based design, making dual-phase latch based implementations excellent candidates for ultra-low-power devices.