A Low-Power VLSI Technique for Digital Signal Processing Portable Electronic Devices

In portable electronic devices that operate on battery power, it is essential to have power saving techniques to increase the operating time as they are energy constrained. This paper presents a novel power saving technique supported by two design models for multimedia purposes. The two designs are with two varying significance. The most significant part is turned off when it can’t produce different results. This is done to save power consumption. The two design examples explored in this paper have varying hardware configurations thus reveal different realization. The models are namely multi-transform model and multimedia functional unit. The former computes three transforms for H.264 encoding while the latter supports six functions which are commonly used namely addition, multiplication, subtraction, interpolation, MAC and sum-ofabsolute-difference. For these designs the proposed VLSI technique is capable of saving power by 27% and 24% respectively at the expence of 20% area overheads. Index Terms Low-power design, multimedia, digital signal processing, video coding, image coding