Siwa: a RISC-V RV32I based Micro-Controller for Implantable Medical Applications

• Published in: 2020 IEEE 11th Latin American Symposium on Circuits & Systems (LASCAS) pp. 1 - 4
• Main Authors: Garcia-Ramirez, R., Chacon-Rodriguez, A., Castro-Gonzalez, R., Arnaud, A., Miguez, M., Gak, J., Molina-Robles, R., Madrigal-Boza, G., Oviedo-Hernandez, M., Solera-Bolanos, E., Salazar-Sibaja, D., Sanchez-Jimenez, D., Fonseca-Rodriguez, M., Arrieta-Solorzano, J., Rimolo-Donadio, R.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.02.2020
• Subjects: Digital VLSI; IMD; Micro-Architecture; RISC-V; System-on-Chip
• ISSN: 2473-4667
• DOI: 10.1109/LASCAS45839.2020.9068952

The design of Siwa 1 , a compact low power custom system on chip (SoC), targeted for implantable/wearable applications, is reported in this paper. Siwa is based on a RISC-V RV32I architecture. It has a centrally controlled non-pipelined structure, and it includes a control interface for an integrated sensing and stimulation device for biological tissues as well as standard communication interfaces. Siwa was developed from scratch using System Verilog, and implemented in a 180nm CMOS technology; Siwa includes a latch based register file c apable to read and write in one clock cycle with an area 30% smaller and a power consumption 25% lower with respect to an equivalent flip flop implementation; also, it has an estimated average power consumption of 70μW (48pJ/cycle) which is comparable to other micro-controllers commonly used in IMD applications.