An SoC Design for Future Mobile DNA Detection

Existing miniature DNA sequencing devices hold significant promise to serve as mobile/personal genomic analysis systems in the future. But a key challenge to this vision is the absence of adequate low-power bioinformatic computing ability within the sequencing device itself. In this letter, we discuss the design and demonstrate a system-on-chip (SoC) based on an accelerated RISC-V core for such a task. The chip was fabricated in 22-nm CMOS and executes almost $10\times $ faster than a commercial mobile processor on a DNA sequence detection task while achieving $200\times $ better energy efficiency.