SoCs for Portable Video Applications: Architecture level Considerations

In this paper, we first review the digital video processing requirements of portable multimedia applications, and highlight the need for a multi-format, multi-standard digital video (DV) engine. We also highlight the variability in compute requirements across the digital video processing spectrum. Given the consumer portable nature of these applications, cost and energy are the key factors driving the architecture of the DV engine. We present various power management strategies for both dynamic and leakage power reduction, and show how these can be applied in the context of DV engine design by leveraging the “variability”. We discuss SoC architecture level implications of extending these power management strategies and finally present EDA challenges Categories and Subject Descriptor