Edge computing solutions that enable the extraction of high level information
from a variety of sensors is in increasingly high demand. This is due to the
increasing number of smart devices that require sensory processing for their
application on the edge. To tackle this problem, we present a smart vision
sensor System on Chip (Soc), featuring an event-based camera and a low power
asynchronous spiking Convolutional Neuronal Network (sCNN) computing
architecture embedded on a single chip. By combining both sensor and processing
on a single die, we can lower unit production costs significantly. Moreover,
the simple end-to-end nature of the SoC facilitates small stand-alone
applications as well as functioning as an edge node in a larger systems. The
event-driven nature of the vision sensor delivers high-speed signals in a
sparse data stream. This is reflected in the processing pipeline, focuses on
optimising highly sparse computation and minimising latency for 9 sCNN layers
to $3.36\mu s$. Overall, this results in an extremely low-latency visual
processing pipeline deployed on a small form factor with a low energy budget
and sensor cost. We present the asynchronous architecture, the individual
blocks, the sCNN processing principle and benchmark against other sCNN capable
processors.

本文介绍了一种嵌入式智能视觉传感器芯片，包括基于事件驱动的相机和低功耗异步脉冲卷积神经网络计算体系结构，可以高效地提取大量传感器数据的高级信息，并以极低的延迟和能量消耗有效处理图像信息。