Low Power Lookup Tables for Huffman Decoding

Mobile video devices are energy constrained and therefore need to contain circuits that consume a minimum amount of energy. In this paper, different architectures of lookup tables for Huffman decoding are studied. The PLA type structure is common in these Huffman lookup tables because of their speed and simplicity advantage. However, we determine that the tree structure for table lookup can be a lower power alternative than a PLA structure in certain situations. These situations accounted for 56% of our total simulations runs, and of these runs, the average power savings of the tree in those situations was 78%. Another goal of this paper is to show the effects of varying the table size and varying the probability distributions of a table on power, area, and delay.