A Power-Efficient Design Employing an Extreme Condition Detector for Embedded Systems

In this paper, a power-efficient scheme for embedded systems with wireless communication applications is proposed to reduce the power consumption of the overall system. Any transmission related module is required to be on only when the transmission is active and reliable to reduce power dissipation. The proposed method is based on the use of the extreme channel condition detector that is designed to detect the extremely bad channel condition. Under such a condition, carrying user information over the air link is completely impossible. The considerable power reduction is achieved by turning off several modules within the embedded system related to the information transmission like LCD, image encoder, voice encoder, and power amplifier under this condition. Moreover, a simple extreme channel condition detector is also proposed in this paper. The design example on the selected platform shows that the proposed scheme is very efficient in power saving for the embedded system.