Low-Power Multimedia System Design by Aggressive Voltage Scaling

Author

Kurdahi, Fadi J. ; Eltawil, Ahmed ; Yi, Kang ; Cheng, Stanley ; Khajeh, Amin

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Volume

18

Issue

5

fYear

2010

fDate

5/1/2010 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

852

Lastpage

856

Abstract

Mobile multimedia systems are growing in complexity and scalability and, correspondingly, in their implementation challenges. By design, these systems have built-in error resilience that has been exploited in many different compression and transmission schemes mainly as a quality tradeoff. This paper proposes a paradigm shift in utilizing error resilience in an application-aware method for reducing the power consumption of memories in such systems by aggressively scaling the supply voltage beyond what is currently considered as ??safe?? operating conditions while maintaining performance. Results on H.264 decoders show that power savings of more than 40% are possible.

Keywords

data compression; multimedia communication; video coding; H.264 decoders; aggressive voltage scaling; application-aware method; compression schemes; error resilience; low-power multimedia system design; mobile multimedia systems; power consumption; transmission schemes; H.264; VLSI; low power; memory management; multimedia systems; voltage scaling;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1063-8210

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TVLSI.2009.2016665

Filename

5169870