A Controller LSI for Realizing VDD-Hopping Scheme with Off-the-Shelf Processors and Its Application to MPEG4 System

Hiroshi KAWAGUCHI  Gang ZHANG  Seongsoo LEE  Youngsoo SHIN  Takayasu SAKURAI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E85-C   No.2   pp.263-271
Publication Date: 2002/02/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on High-Performance and Low-Power Microprocessors)
Category: Low-Power Technologies
Keyword: 
low power,  real-time embedded system,  dynamic voltage scaling,  application slicing,  MPEG4,  

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Summary: 
An LSI has been fabricated and measured to demonstrate feasibility of VDD-hopping scheme in an embedded system level by executing MPEG4 CODEC. In the VDD-hopping, supply voltage of a processor is dynamically controlled by a hardware-software cooperative mechanism depending on workload of the processor. When the workload is about a half, the VDD-hopping is shown to reduce power to less than a quarter compared to the conventional fixed-VDD scheme. The power saving is achieved without degrading real-time features of MPEG4 CODEC.