Digital predistortion (DPD) is a popular technique to enhance signal quality in wideband radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs). With increasing bandwidth and data rates, DPD faces significant energy consumption challenges during deployment, contrasting with its efficiency goals. State-of-the-art DPD models rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), whose computational complexity hinders system efficiency. This letter introduces DeltaDPD, exploring the dynamic temporal sparsity of input signals and neuronal hidden states in RNNs for energy-efficient DPD, reducing arithmetic operations and memory accesses while preserving satisfactory linearization performance. Applying a TM3.1a 200 MHz-BW 256-QAM OFDM signal to a 3.5-GHz GaN Doherty RF PA, DeltaDPD achieves −50.03 dBc in adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR), −37.22dB in normalized mean square error (NMSE) and −38.52 dB in error vector magnitude (EVM) with 52% temporal sparsity, leading to a 1.8\times reduction in estimated inference power.

Epileptic seizures cause abnormal brain activity, and their unpredictability can lead to accidents, underscoring the need for long-term seizure prediction. Although seizures can be predicted by analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, existing methods often require too many channels or larger models, limiting mobile usability. This paper introduces a SlimSeiz framework that utilizes adaptive channel selection with a lightweight neural network model. SlimSeiz operates in two states: the first stage selects the optimal channel set for seizure prediction using machine learning algorithms, and the second stage employs a lightweight neural network based on convolution and Mamba for prediction. On the Children's Hospital Boston-MIT (CHB-MIT) EEG dataset, SlimSeiz can reduce channels from 22 to 8 while claiming a satisfactory result of 94.8% accuracy, 95.5% sensitivity, and 94.0% specificity with only 21.2 K model parameters, matching or outperforming larger models' performance. We also validate SlimSeiz on a new EEG dataset, SRH-LEI, collected from Shanghai Renji Hospital, demonstrating its effectiveness across different patients. The code and SRH-LEI dataset are available at https://github.com/guoruilu/SlimSeiz.

Traditional models based on electroencephalographic (EEG) signals for seizure monitoring encounter difficulties in simultaneously optimizing accuracy, response latency, and computational load. These challenges hinder their deployment in edge computing environments, where real-time local inference is critical. To address these issues, we introduce a novel network architecture, designated as HengNet. This architecture integrates a Two-level Reuse Algorithm (TRA), which strategically reutilizes outputs from intermediate layers, considerably reducing the average computational load per inference - vital for scenarios requiring frequent inferences. When tested on the CHB-MIT dataset, this patient-specific model attains classification accuracies of 95.67% and 99.60% for seizure prediction and detection, respectively. Notably, it maintains an average computational load of merely 0.05 million multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) per inference and has a compact model size of 6.87 K parameters. These results represent a significant advancement compared with existing methods. Operating at a rate of 32 inferences per second, the computational load of the model for seizure prediction has been reduced by more than 19.4 times, and for seizure detection, by more than 6.4 times.

The increasing adoption of Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based Digital Pre-distortion (DPD) in modern communication systems necessitates efficient hardware implementations. This paper presents DPD-NeuralEngine, an ultra-fast, tiny-area, and power-efficient DPD accelerator based on a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network (NN). Leveraging a co-designed software and hardware approach, our 22 nm CMOS implementation operates at 2 GHz, capable of processing I/Q signals up to 250 MSps. Experimental results demonstrate a throughput of 256.5 GOPS and power efficiency of 1.32 TOPS/W with DPD linearization performance measured in Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) of -45.3 dBc and Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) of -39.8 dB. To our knowledge, this work represents the first AI-based DPD application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) accelerator, achieving a power-area efficiency (PAE) of 6.6

This paper presents CleanUMamba, a time-domain neural network architecture designed for real-time causal audio denoising directly applied to raw waveforms. CleanUMamba leverages a U-Net encoder-decoder structure, incorporating the Mamba state-space model in the bottleneck layer. By replacing conventional self-attention and LSTM mechanisms with Mamba, our architecture offers superior denoising performance while maintaining a constant memory footprint, enabling streaming operation. To enhance efficiency, we applied structured channel pruning, achieving an 8X reduction in model size without compromising audio quality. Our model demonstrates strong results in the Interspeech 2020 Deep Noise Suppression challenge. Specifically, CleanUMamba achieves a PESQ score of 2.42 and STOI of 95.1% with only 442K parameters and 468M MACs, matching or outperforming larger models in real-time performance. Code will be available at: https://github.com/lab-emi/CleanUMamba

Epilepsy is a common disease of the nervous system. Timely prediction of seizures and intervention treatment can significantly reduce the accidental injury of patients and protect the life and health of patients. This paper presents a tiny neuromorphic Spiking Convolutional Transformer, named Spiking Conformer, to detect and predict epileptic seizure segments from scalped long-term electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. We report evaluation results from the Spiking Conformer model using the Boston Children's Hospital-MIT (CHB-MIT) EEG dataset. By leveraging spike-based addition operations, the Spiking Conformer significantly reduces the classification computational cost compared to the non-spiking model. Additionally, we introduce an approximate spiking neuron layer to further reduce spike-triggered neuron updates by nearly 38% without sacrificing accuracy. Using raw EEG data as input, the proposed Spiking Conformer achieved an average sensitivity rate of 94.9% and a specificity rate of 99.3% for the seizure detection task, and 96.8%, 89.5% for the seizure prediction task, and needs >10x fewer operations compared to the non-spiking equivalent model.

Digital predistortion (DPD) enhances signal quality in wideband radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs). As signal bandwidths expand in modern radio systems, DPD's energy consumption increasingly impacts overall system efficiency. Deep neural networks (DNNs) offer promising advancements in DPD, yet their high complexity hinders their practical deployment. This article introduces open-source mixed-precision (MP) neural networks that employ quantized low-precision fixed-point parameters for energy-efficient DPD. This approach reduces computational complexity and memory footprint, thereby lowering power consumption without compromising linearization efficacy. Applied to a 160-MHz-BW 1024-QAM OFDM signal from a digital RF PA, MP-DPD gives no performance loss against 32-bit floating-point precision DPDs, while achieving -43.75 (L)/-45.27 (R) dBc in the adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) and -38.72 dB in error vector magnitude (EVM). A 16-bit fixed-point-precision MP-DPD enables a 2.8× reduction in estimated inference power. The DPD code in PyTorch is publicly available on GitHub.

This paper presents a sparse Change-Based Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (CB-ConvLSTM) model for event-based eye tracking, key for next-generation wearable healthcare technology such as AR/VR headsets. We leverage the benefits of retina-inspired event cameras, namely their low-latency response and sparse output event stream, over traditional frame-based cameras. Our CB-ConvLSTM architecture efficiently extracts spatio-temporal features for pupil tracking from the event stream, outperforming conventional CNN structures. Utilizing a delta-encoded recurrent path enhancing activation sparsity, CB-ConvLSTM reduces arithmetic operations by approximately 4.7× without losing accuracy when tested on a v2e-generated event dataset of labeled pupils. This increase in efficiency makes it ideal for real-time eye tracking in resource-constrained devices. The project code and dataset are openly available at https://github.com/qinche106/cb-convlstm-eyetracking.

Keyword spotting (KWS) is an important task on edge low-power audio devices. A typical edge KWS system consists of a front-end feature extractor which outputs mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features followed by a back-end neural network classifier. KWS edge designs aim for the best power-performance-area metrics. This work proposes an area-efficient ultra-low-power time-domain infinite impulse response (IIR) filter-based feature extractor for a KWS system. It uses a serial architecture, and the architecture is further optimized for a low-cost computing structure and mixed-precision bit selection of the IIR coefficients while maintaining good KWS accuracy. Using a 65 nm process technology and a back-end neural network classifier, this simulated feature extractor has an area of 0.02 mm2 and achieves 3.3 μW @ 1.2 V, and achieves 92.5% accuracy on a 10-keyword, 12-class KWS task using the GSCD dataset.

As deep learning models scale, they become increasingly competitive from domains spanning from computer vision to natural language processing; however, this happens at the expense of efficiency since they require increasingly more memory and computing power. The power efficiency of the biological brain outperforms any large-scale deep learning (DL) model; thus, neuromorphic computing tries to mimic the brain operations, such as spike-based information processing, to improve the efficiency of DL models. Despite the benefits of the brain, such as efficient information transmission, dense neuronal interconnects, and the co-location of computation and memory, the available biological substrate has severely constrained the evolution of biological brains. Electronic hardware does not have the same constraints; therefore, while modeling spiking neural networks (SNNs) might uncover one piece of the puzzle, the design of efficient hardware backends for SNNs needs further investigation, potentially taking inspiration from the available work done on the artificial neural networks (ANNs) side. As such, when is it wise to look at the brain while designing new hardware, and when should it be ignored? To answer this question, we quantitatively compare the digital hardware acceleration techniques and platforms of ANNs and SNNs. As a result, we provide the following insights: (i) ANNs currently process static data more efficiently, (ii) applications targeting data produced by neuromorphic sensors, such as event-based cameras and silicon cochleas, need more investigation since the behavior of these sensors might naturally fit the SNN paradigm, and (iii) hybrid approaches combining SNNs and ANNs might lead to the best solutions and should be investigated further at the hardware level, accounting for both efficiency and loss optimization.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are developed as a promising alternative to artificial neural networks (ANNs) due to their more realistic brain-inspired computing models. SNNs have sparse neuron firing over time, i.e., spatio-temporal sparsity; thus, they are useful to enable energy-efficient hardware inference. However, exploiting spatio-temporal sparsity of SNNs in hardware leads to unpredictable and unbalanced workloads, degrading the energy efficiency. In this work, we propose an FPGA-based convolutional SNN accelerator called Skydiver that exploits spatio-temporal workload balance. We propose the approximate proportional relation construction (APRC) method that can predict the relative workload channel-wisely and a channel-balanced workload schedule (CBWS) method to increase the hardware workload balance ratio to over 90%. Skydiver was implemented on a Xilinx XC7Z045 FPGA and verified on image segmentation and MNIST classification tasks. Results show improved throughput by 1.4× and 1.2× for the two tasks. Skydiver achieved 22.6KFPS throughput, and 42.4∼μ J/image prediction energy on the classification task with 98.5% accuracy.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising alternatives to artificial neural networks (ANNs) since they are more realistic brain-inspired computing models. SNNs have sparse neuron firing over time, i.e., spatiotemporal sparsity; thus, they are helpful in enabling energy-efficient hardware inference. However, exploiting the spatiotemporal sparsity of SNNs in hardware leads to unpredictable and unbalanced workloads, degrading the energy efficiency. Compared to SNNs with simple fully connected structures, those extensive structures (e.g., standard convolutions, depthwise convolutions, and pointwise convolutions) can deal with more complicated tasks but lead to difficulties in hardware mapping. In this work, we propose a novel reconfigurable architecture, Cerebron, which can fully exploit the spatiotemporal sparsity in SNNs with maximized data reuse and propose optimization techniques to improve the efficiency and flexibility of the hardware. To achieve flexibility, the reconfigurable compute engine is compatible with a variety of spiking layers and supports inter-computing-unit (CU) and intra-CU reconfiguration. The compute engine can exploit data reuse and guarantee parallel data access when processing different convolutions to achieve memory efficiency. A two-step data sparsity exploitation method is introduced to leverage the sparsity of discrete spikes and reduce the computation time. Besides, an online channelwise workload scheduling strategy is designed to reduce the latency further. Cerebron is verified on image segmentation and classification tasks using a variety of state-of-the-art spiking network structures. Experimental results show that Cerebron has achieved at least 17.5<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math> </inline-formula> prediction energy reduction and 20<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math> </inline-formula> speedup compared with state-of-the-art field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based accelerators.