A low power architecture for AER event-processing microcontroller

This paper presents a custom MSP430™-compatible microcontroller, specifically tailored for quasi-digital processing Address Event Representation (AER) events. Main target applications are fully reprogrammable sensory systems where events pre-processing has to be carried out by means of easily-tunable elaboration algorithms; a microcontroller-based design could provide the right trade-off between flexibility and performance. Key features are good time resolution, high reactivity, on-demand only processing and power consumption reduction. The proposed architecture has been analyzed and compared with an open source MSP430TM-compliant microcontroller (openMSP430) in terms of performance and power consumption. Accurate and wide cases-spectrum simulations (targeting ASIC technology) show an average power consumption reduction ranging from 50 % (same operating frequency) up to 79 % (same maximum event rate); equivalently, with the same power budget, an average improvement of either resolution of 84 % or maximum event rate of 1020 % is obtained.