Energy aware distributed arithmetic DCT architectures

An energy aware DCT (discrete cosine transform) architecture based on the distributed arithmetic concept is proposed. Architectures based on the distributed arithmetic concept are inherently low power as they are multiplication free algorithms. One characteristic of the DCT is that signal energies are concentrated in only a few coefficients (less than 25%) upon transformation, with the rest (or 75%) of the coefficients being insignificant and negligible. One can skip the computation of these terms without seriously affecting the output signal quality. Exploiting this idea, we propose an energy aware DCT architecture which adaptively trades off image quality with power dissipation. Our simulation results show that the new proposed architecture achieves 60% in power savings with a small degradation in signal quality.