Achievements towards specific objective 1:
Minima hardware design flow has been improved and documented. Compatibility of Minima HW design flow with commercial EDA tools has been verified during the project. SW process has been defined and in use. DevOps methodology together with different kind of development environments (emulator, FPGA, asic) ensures effective development and integration of Minima SW to various processors and operating systems. Both HW design flow and SW process are currently in use but both of them are continuously improved to reach 1 month target. Minima technology was integrated to Rocket based RISC-V CPU core. Minima SW components have been optimized to consume as few clock cycles as possible. This ensures that Minima SW can be integrated to very small IoT designs. Compatibility with several operating systems has been implemented and verified. Also, bare metal solution e.g. Without operating system is supported. DFT (Design for testing) has been implemented to make customer’s production testing easier. Additionally, a new fully on-chip DC-DC converter was designed. Compared to off-chip realizations, the loop is c. 10x faster which will translate to well over 20% performance savings.
Achievements towards specific objective 2:
We have generated the first truly vertical audio analysis solution which allows for hierarchical algorithms. Minima Kosmos test chip is an Integrated wireless connectivity chip with incorporated Minima Technology. Speech recognition solution was made in co-operation with Rubidium. Minima demonstrator provides voice trigger solution which demonstrates the use of Minima IP in typical always on solution. Analysis capability was verified with demonstrator. Measurements pointed out that the expected energy saving was achieved when TEP Xtensa core is running in listening mode compared to Vanilla Xtensa performing the same task. The deep learning solution is based on Key Word Spotting (KWS) algorithm developed by Arm.
Achievements towards specific objective 3:
Design flow and simulation results have been validated with a semiconductor company. Minima Processor co-operated with a Finland-based health technology company focusing on small wellbeing monitors in this project. As a result of this task, we have finalised and validated our technology specifications for a challenging wellbeing use-case.
Achievements towards specific objective 4:
We were demonstrating our test silicon including Tensilica Hifi Mini core optimized with Minima dynamic margining technology. The chip is manufactured in TSMC 40LP technology and mounted on PCB. Various SW applications developed by Minima can be demonstrated using this board. That then leads to a deeper technical evaluation phase with the customer including several rounds of technical Q&A, conf calls and customers visits.
