Low-power filtering via adaptive error-cancellation

A low-power technique for digital filtering referred to as adaptive error-cancellation (AEC) is presented in this paper. The AEC technique falls under the general class of algorithmic noise-tolerance (ANT) techniques proposed earlier for combating transient/soft errors. The proposed AEC technique exploits the correlation between the input and soft errors to estimate and cancel out the latter. In this paper, we apply AEC along with voltage overscaling (VOS), where the voltage is scaled beyond the minimum (referred to as V/sub dd-crit/) necessary for correct operation. We employ the AEC technique in the context of a frequency-division multiplexed (FDM) communication system and demonstrate that up to 71% energy reduction can be achieved over present-day voltage-scaled systems.