StreamPoP: Stream programming oriented power-efficient audio DSP

In stream programming style, the computation and the memory accesses are decoupled as much as possible. Such kind of programming style has brought new profits both on performance and power-efficiency for digital signal processing. In this paper, the architecture of a stream programming oriented power-efficient digital signal processor named as StreamPoP has been presented for consumer audio applications. The instruction and data supply subsystem of StreamPoP has been well designed for flexible stream programming and high power-efficiency. To further reduce the power consumption, an audio computation specific deep-instruction-pipeline (DIP) has been used in the micro-architecture of StreamPoP. To evaluate the performance of StreamPoP for consumer audio applications, a set of audio benchmarks have been used. It has been presented in this paper that the performance of StreamPoP is better than conventional high performance DSPs, while the former architecture is much more power-efficient for audio applications. The simulated power consumption result of StreamPoP under TSMC 90nm process is 5.1mW for AAC real-time decoding.