Anawake: Signal-Based Power Management For Digital Signal Processing Systems

Single-chip, low-power, programmable digital signal processing systems are capable of hosting complete speech processing applications, while consuming a few milliwatts of average power. We present a power management architecture that decreases the average power consumption of these systems to 3–10 microwatts, in applications where speech signals are present with a sufficiently low duty cycle. In this architecture, a micropower analog signal processing system, Anawake, continuously analyzes the incoming signal, and controls the power consumption of the DSP system in a signal-dependent way. We estimate system power consumption for Anawake designs optimized for different peak-speech-signal to average-background-noise ratios.