A FIXED-POINT MPEG AUDIO PROCESSOR FOR LOW FREQEUNCY OPERATION

A fixed-point pipelined processor optimized for decoding MPEG-1 audio layer III (MP3) is presented. Various examination and experiments on the decoding algorithm are exploited to lower the operating frequency. Accordingly, the dynamic scaling method is used to preserve the precision while computing in fixed-point arithmetic. Also, a novel instruction set and an addressing mode tuned for MP3 decoding are presented. The resulting cycle count required to decode a frame is so small that the proposed processor can operate with 12.8 MHz