HEEPocrates: An Ultra-Low-Power RISC-V Microcontroller for Edge-Computing Healthcare Applications

The field of edge computing in healthcare has seen remarkable growth due to the increasing demand for real-time processing of data in applications. However, challenges persist due to limitations in healthcare devices' performance and power efficiency. To overcome these challenges, heterogeneous architectures that combine host processors with specialized accelerators have emerged, leading to improved performance and power consumption. In this work, we present HEEPocrates, an ultra-low-power RISC-V microcontroller for edge computing healthcare applications. The chip combines the open-source eXtendible Heterogeneous Energy-Efficient Platform (X-HEEP) with a coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) and in-memory computing (IMC) accelerators, both of which are efficient in reducing the energy consumption of healthcare applications.