Dynamic Precision Scaling for Low Power WCDMA Receiver

Abstract — One of the most important applications of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is wireless communication. This kind of application requires low power implementation of DSP, which generally uses fixed-point arithmetic. The fixed-point architec-tures should be developed to maintain the energy consumption power at a reasonable level. In this paper, an approach which adapts the fixed-point specification according to the input receiver Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is proposed. To underline our approach interest, the rake receiver of a WCDMA receiver is examined. Results show about 25 % – 40 % energy savings with our dynamic precision approach. I