Design and Evaluation of a Near-Sensor Magneto-Electric FET-Based Event Detector

As a recently developed post-CMOS FET, magneto-electric FETs (MEFETs) offer high-speed and low-power design characteristics for logic and memory applications. In this article, a near-sensor processing (NSP) platform leveraging the MEFETs is presented that enables event detection for edge vision sensors at a low cost by eliminating the need for power-hungry analog-to-digital circuits (ADCs). Besides, an efficient background comparison method is presented with adjustable precision that offers the output quality efficiency tradeoff, depending on the application's needs. Our device-to-architecture evaluations show that the proposed hardware-software codesign reduces the energy consumption and execution time on average by a factor of similar to 15x and similar to 2.4x compared to the SOT-MRAM counterpart running employing the same method.