A 9-mm² Ultra-Low-Power Highly Integrated 28-nm CMOS SoC for Internet of Things

This paper gives an overview of the Blackghost 1.0 system-on-chip (SoC) from Qualcomm Research, which was our first test chip that paved the way toward the commercialization of Qualcomm’s most recent ultra-low-power Blackghost SoC family. Specifically designed for battery powered Internet of Things, sensor fusion, wearables, and e-medical applications, this highly integrated SoC delivers high-power efficiency through low-power innovations in architecture and circuit domains. It integrates a small footprint sensor control processor based on ARM Cortex-M0, a vision classifier processor, a streaming DSP hardware accelerator, an ultra-low-power analog-front-end, and an on-die power management unit with direct Li-Ion battery attach capability. The die size of this prototype chip is <tex-math notation="LaTeX">3× 3 </tex-math> mm 2 in a 28LP CMOS process technology. To date, this SoC family has successfully progressed to the mass production of near-threshold computing. The logic computation operates at near-threshold voltages (<0.6 V) at frequencies up to 50 MHz and draws less than <tex-math notation="LaTeX">9~μ </tex-math> A/MHz from the directly attached battery.