A low-power variable length decoder for MPEG-2 based on successive decoding of short codewords

This paper presents a low-power variable length decoder exploiting the statistics of successive codewords. The decoder employs small look-up tables working as fixed caches to reduce the number of activations of a variable length code detector where considerable power is consumed. The power simulation results estimated using PowerMill show that 35% energy is reduced on the average compared to the previous low-power scheme.