Process-Variation Resilient and Voltage-Scalable DCT Architecture for Robust Low-Power Computing

作者：Karakonstantis Georgios^*; Banerjee Nilanjan; Roy Kaushik

来源：IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, 2010, 18(10): 1461-1470.

DOI：10.1109/TVLSI.2009.2025279

• Low power design
• power-quality tradeoffs
• process variation tolerance
• voltage over-scaling

In this paper, we present a novel discrete cosine transform (DCT) architecture that allows aggressive voltage scaling for low-power dissipation, even under process parameter variations with minimal overhead as opposed to existing techniques. Under a scaled supply voltage and/or variations in process parameters, any possible delay errors appear only from the long paths that are designed to be less contributive to output quality. The proposed architecture allows a graceful degradation in the peak SNR (PSNR) under aggressive voltage scaling as well as extreme process variations. Results show that even under large process variations ( +/-3 sigma around mean threshold voltage) and aggressive supply voltage scaling (at 0.88 V, while the nominal voltage is 1.2 V for a 90-nm technology), there is a gradual degradation of image quality with considerable power savings (71% at PSNR of 23.4 dB) for the proposed architecture, when compared to existing implementations in a 90-nm process technology.

• 出版日期2010-10