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In recent years, computing paradigms have evolved significantly. One such paradigm is cloud computing, a centralized paradigm that aims to offer computing as a utility. Another complementary paradigm is edge computing, a decentralized paradigm that aims to offer smart compute capabilities at the edge of the network. A related term is the Internet of Things (IoT), which refers to large numbers of interconnected computing devices aimed at offering services to a great variety of applications.

In this chapter, we specifically focus on IoT edge devices: smart devices at the edge of the network that interact with the “real world”. These devices acquire data from the environment using sensors. This data is subsequently processed locally on the IoT edge device and/or on computing devices in the network. For each application, a proper trade-off must be made about which functions to perform where based on the requirements for computing, bandwidth, latency, connectivity, security, reliability, etc.

The number of IoT edge devices is predicted to grow to tens of billions over the coming years. Some example IoT edge devices are:

 – smartphones and tablets;

 – smart doorbells with cameras, performing face detection for triggering an alert, accompanied by an image or video, on the owner’s smartphone;

 – smart speakers with voice control, employing local speech recognition for a limited vocabulary of voice commands while relaying other speech data into the cloud for more advanced analysis;

 – smart sensing devices used in agriculture to monitor and control, for example, soil quality, crop yield and livestock, while sporadically communicating data over cellular connections using, for example, NB-IoT protocols for low power consumption.

Many IoT edge devices are battery-operated and demand an optimized implementation in order to enable a long battery life. Therefore, we must target low power consumption for functions that need to be performed in software locally on the IoT edge device. This, in turn, requires programmable processors that are optimized for executing these software functions efficiently, which is the topic of this chapter.