BIOS: A 40nm Bionic Sensor-defined 0.47pJ/SOP, 268.7TSOPs/W Configurable Spiking Neuron-in-Memory Processor for Wearable Healthcare

This work presents the first configurable spiking neuron-in-memory (BIOS) processor that leverages the characteristics of bionic sensors to enable ultra-efficient wearable healthcare applications. The BIOS processor offers four key features: 1) A sensor-defined architecture that supports level-crossing sampling and sparse processing; 2) A spike-triggered neural circuit that saves processing energy; 3) High robustness for spike operations (SOPs) enabled by current-based, instead of charge-based, in-memory integration; 4) A configurable neuron-in-memory cell array that supports various network models and firing threshold values. Using a 5bit analog-to-spike converter (ASC), the proposed BIOS processor achieves state-of-the-art energy efficiency of 0.47pJ/SOP, 0.48uJ/Inference, and 268.7TSOPs/W with 95.31% accuracy for arrhythmia detection on MIT-BIH dataset. These results compare favorably in terms of accuracy, efficiency and overall FoM with recent works.