High-level design synthesis of a low power, VLIW processor for the IS-54 VSELP speech encoder

General purpose DSPs typically used to implement speech coders in digital cellular phones do not allow enough exploitation of the speech coding algorithm itself for power reduction. In this paper, high-level design synthesis of a low power, VLIW (very long instruction word) processor dedicated to implementing the IS-54 VSELP speech encoding algorithm is presented. Significant power reduction is achieved through algorithm dependent techniques, including application specific hardware design, supply voltage reduction through highly parallel execution, and exploitation of data correlation inherent to the algorithm. Preliminary estimates indicate that the design could result in a 5.35 mm² processor that executes in real-time with an average power dissipation of about 28 mW