A 0.2-to-3.6TOPS/W Programmable Convolutional Imager SoC with In-Sensor Current-Domain Ternary-Weighted MAC Operations for Feature Extraction and Region-of-Interest Detection

Mixed-signal vision chips are becoming increasingly popular for low-power embedded computer vision applications on smartphones, wearables and IoT nodes, as they meet stringent power and area constraints while maintaining a sufficient level of accuracy for low- to medium-level image processing tasks. On the one hand, in-sensor processing [1, 2] enables massively parallel operation but relies on pixel-level processing elements that degrade the pixel pitch and restrict the convolutional receptive field to neighboring pixels [1], precluding multi-scale operation. On the other hand, near-sensor processing [3–5] can operate at multiple scales by pixel downsampling [3] or binning [4] but entails significant power and area overhead as an analog memory is required to store pixel values awaiting processing. In addition, previous near-sensor processing SoCs are generally application-specific and thus suffer from limited versatility. In this paper, we present a 65nm QQVGA convolutional imager SoC codenamed SleepSpotter capable of versatile feature extraction and region-of-interest (RoI) detection based on in-sensor current-domain MAC operations. It operates at 6 different scales, features programmable filter size (F), stride (S), and ternary filter weights (1.5b). It reaches a minimum energy of 2.5pJ/pixel•frame•filter and a peak efficiency of 3.6TOPS/W, with 29% pixel area overhead for enabling the convolution and without the need for an analog memory.