Energy-efficient digital filtering using ML-based error correction (ML-EC) technique

We present a maximum likelihood-based error correction (ML-EC) technique which achieves significant power savings in digital filtering. Although voltage over-scaling (VOS) can achieve high energy efficiency, it can introduce "soft errors" which severely degrade the performance of the filter. The proposed scheme detects, estimates and corrects these soft errors via an ML-based algorithm that achieves up to 47% power savings without any SNR loss and up to 60% power savings with a 1.5 dB SNR loss for an example case study of a frequency-selective low-pass filter.