Circuit-level power efficiency investigation of advanced DSP architectures based on a specialized power modeling technique

Abstract

This work presents an analysis of power efficiency in microprocessor architectures targeting wide-range digital signal processing (DSP) applications. We defined a circuit level power estimation technique based on the integration of traditional analytical power models so as to account for both block-internal and interconnects-dependent dissipation and we extended it to provide applicability to specific DSP-related structures. We applied the modeling approach to several architecture schemes and demonstrated that a relatively novel solution, namely the transfer triggered architecture, can be the most power-efficient scheme in DSP applications.