Event-based design for mitigating energy in electronic systems

International audienceToday, our digital society exchanges data flows that are incredibly large and the future promises us a data explosion due to the communications between our technological equipment, robots, etc. Indeed, we are close to widely open the door of the Internet of Things (IoT). This data orgy will waste a lot of energy and will contribute to a non-ecological approach of our digital life. Indeed, the Internet and the new technologies consume about 10% of the electrical power produced in the world. Considering that we are only at the beginning of the IoT, it is urgent to enhance the energetic performances of the electronic circuits and systems.The design paradigm based on synchronizing digital circuit communication with a clock is source of useless activity and of complicated design techniques. The digital circuit design based on local synchronizations, also called asynchronous circuits, is a way to mitigate the power consumption in electronics by only activating the circuitry when an event appears. In addition, another way to reduce energy is to rethink the sampling techniques and digital processing chains. Indeed, by using the Shannon theory, we produce more data than necessary. Indeed, useless data produce more computation, more storage, more communications and also more power consumption. If we go beyond the Shannon theory, we can discover new sampling schemes and new processing techniques able to take advantage of event-based design. Drastically reducing the useless data and activity is maybe the Grail of low-power computing