Low-power signal processing via error-cancellation

We present an algorithmic noise-tolerance (ANT) technique for designing low-power DSP systems. The proposed technique achieves substantial energy savings via voltage overscaling, whereby the supply voltage is scaled beyond the minimum supply voltage V_dd-crit at which the architecture operates correctly for a given throughput specification. The resulting input-dependent soft errors are corrected via a low-complexity error canceller and hence is referred to as adaptive error-cancellation. The trade-off between energy savings and algorithmic performance is illustrated by employing a reduced-order least mean square (LMS) algorithm to compensate for the design overhead. Simulation results in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves up to 73% energy savings in a multiuser communication scenario over present-day voltage-scaling, with a 3 dB algorithmic performance loss. Moreover, a 40% energy reduction is obtained over conventional DSP systems without algorithmic performance degradation