Optimize your DSPs for power and performance

By Michel Laurence, Octasic
January 04, 2007 -- dspdesignline.com

The ever-growing demand for rich, multimedia signal processing in mobile devices raises a chronic technology challenge. The challenge is to squeeze higher functionality and performance within increasingly tighter power and space constraints. As a result, power-performance metrics are now a central concern in DSP design. New methods have been devised enabling designers to address the main areas of power consumption— namely leakage power, clock trees, logic transitions, and power grids— to significantly improve performance compared to conventional techniques.

In today's CMOS technology, power is consumed in two basic ways: statically and dynamically. Static power is consumed continuously—even during standby operation—through various leakage mechanisms. Dynamic power is consumed only during activity, such as logic and interface operations.

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