A High-Speed Embedded Event Detector for Mobile DNA Sequencing

DNA sequencing hardware is rapidly evolving into a mobile platform. Hand held technologies are capable of measuring the equivalent of a human genome every hour within a 5 W power window. Rapid event detection, as as a means of feature extraction for downstream processing or rapid pattern classification, is a critical computational function in this domain. The algorithmic and hardware design of an embedded event detector capable of serving in such a capacity is described in this paper. The device achieves a computational efficiency of 5600 MIPS/W while seeking 32 unique signal levels, a performance level capable of processing the equivalent of 1 human genome per hour within a 1 W power budget.