Low-power programmable signal processing

Abstract

This paper presents the potential of using programmable analog signal processing techniques for impacting low-power portable applications like imaging, audio processing, and speech recognition. The range of analog signal processing functions available results in many potential opportunities to incorporate these analog signal processing systems with digital signal processing systems for improved overall system performance. Programmable, dense analog techniques enable these approaches, based upon programmable transistor approaches. We show experimental evidence for the factor of 1000 to 10,000 power efficiency improvement for programmable analog signal processing compared to custom digital implementations in vector matrix multipliers (VMM), CMOS imagers with computation on the pixel plane with high fill factors, and large-scale field programmable analog arrays (FPAA), among others.