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A Bespoke Design Approach to Low-Power Printed Microprocessors for Machine Learning Applications

Hardware Architecture 2025-03-28 v1

Abstract

Printed electronics have gained significant traction in recent years, presenting a viable path to integrating computing into everyday items, from disposable products to low-cost healthcare. However, the adoption of computing in these domains is hindered by strict area and power constraints, limiting the effectiveness of general-purpose microprocessors. This paper proposes a bespoke microprocessor design approach to address these challenges, by tailoring the design to specific applications and eliminating unnecessary logic. Targeting machine learning applications, we further optimize core operations by integrating a SIMD MAC unit supporting 4 precision configurations that boost the efficiency of microprocessors. Our evaluation across 6 ML models and the large-scale Zero-Riscy core, shows that our methodology can achieve improvements of 22.2%, 23.6%, and 33.79% in area, power, and speed, respectively, without compromising accuracy. Against state-of-the-art printed processors, our approach can still offer significant speedups, but along with some accuracy degradation. This work explores how such trade-offs can enable low-power printed microprocessors for diverse ML applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.21671,
  title  = {A Bespoke Design Approach to Low-Power Printed Microprocessors for Machine Learning Applications},
  author = {Panagiotis Chaidos and Giorgos Armeniakos and Sotirios Xydis and Dimitrios Soudris},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.21671},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS `25), May 25-28, London, United Kingdom

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:36:57.683Z