Power/Performance Exploration of Single-core and Multi-core Processor Approaches for Biomedical Signal Processing

This study presents a single-core and a multi-core processor architecture for health monitoring systems where slow biosignal events and highly parallel computations exist. The single-core architecture is composed of a processing core (PC), an instruction memory (IM) and a data memory (DM), while the multi-core architecture consists of PCs, individual IMs for each core, a shared DM and an interconnection crossbar between the cores and the DM. These architectures are compared with respect to power vs performance trade-offs for a multi-lead electrocardiogram signal conditioning application exploiting near threshold computing. The results show that the multi-core solution consumes 66% less power for high computation requirements (50.1 MOps/s), whereas 10.4% more power for low computation needs (681 kOps/s).