System-Level Synthesis for Wireless Sensor Node Controllers

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a new and very challenging research field for embedded system design automation. Engineering a WSN node hardware platform is known to be a tough challenge, as the design must enforce many severe constraints, among which energy dissipation is by far the most important one. WSN node devices have until now been designed using off-the-shelf low-power microcontroller units (MCUs), even if their power dissipation is still an issue and hinders the widespread use of this new technology. In this work, we propose a complete system-level flow for an alternative approach based on the concept of hardware microtasks, which relies on hardware specialization and power gating to drastically improve the energy efficiency of the computational/control part of the node. Our case study shows that power savings between one to two orders of magnitude are possible w.r.t. MCU-based implementations.