MANTIS: A Mixed-Signal Near-Sensor Convolutional Imager SoC Using Charge-Domain 4b-Weighted 5-to-84-TOPS/W MAC Operations for Feature Extraction and Region-of-Interest Detection

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have prompted the search for enhanced algorithms and hardware to support the deployment of machine learning (ML) at the edge. More specifically, in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), vision chips must be able to fulfill the tasks of low to medium complexity, such as feature extraction (FE) or region-of-interest (RoI) detection, with a sub-mW power budget imposed by the use of small batteries or energy harvesting. Mixed-signal vision chips relying on in- or near-sensor processing have emerged as an interesting candidate because of their favorable tradeoff between energy efficiency (EE) and computational accuracy compared with digital systems for these specific tasks. In this article, we introduce a mixed-signal convolutional imager system-on-chip (SoC) codenamed MANTIS, featuring a unique combination of large $16{\times }16~4$ b-weighted filters, operation at multiple scales, and double sampling, well suited to the requirements of medium-complexity tasks. The main contributions are (i) circuits called DS3 units combining delta-reset sampling (DRS), image downsampling (DS), and voltage downshifting and (ii) charge-domain multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations based on switched-capacitor (SC) amplifiers and charge sharing in the capacitive DAC of the successive-approximation (SAR) ADCs, MANTIS achieves peak EEs normalized to 1b operations of 4.6 and 84.1 TOPS/W at the accelerator and SoC levels, while computing feature maps (fmaps) with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) ranging from 3 to 11.3%. It also demonstrates a face RoI detection with a false negative rate (FNR) of 11.5%, while discarding 81.3% of image patches and reducing the data transmitted off chip by $13{\times }$ compared with the raw image.