Modeling the power consumption of audio signal processing computations using customized numerical representations

This paper explores the impact that numerical representation has on the power consumption of audio signal processing applications. The motivation is digital hearing aids, for which minimizing the power consumption is a critical design goal. We investigate two aspects of this problem. First, we evaluate the validity of using signal transition counts to model actual power consumption within this problem domain, and second, we compare the relative power consumption of multiply-accumulate operations for several customized numerical representations.