Ultra-low-power DSP for Audio Signal Processing

오디오 신호 처리를 위한 초저전력 DSP 프로세서

In this paper, we introduce SlimSRP, an ultra-low-power digital signal processor (DSP) solution for mobile audio and voice applications. So far, application processors (APs) have taken charge of all the tasks in mobile devices. However, they have suffered from short battery life problems to deal with complex usage scenarios, such as always-on voice trigger with continuous audio playback. From extensive analysis of audio and voice application characteristics, SlimSRP is designed to relive the performance and power burden of APs. It employs three-issue VLIW architecture, and the major low-power and high-performance techniques include: (1) an optimized register-file architecture friendly for constants generation, (2) a powerful instruction set to reduce the number of register file accesses and (3) a unique instruction compression scheme that contributes to saved memory size and reduced cache miss. An implementation of SlimSRP runs at up to 200MHz and the logic occupies 95K NAND2 gates in Samsung 28LPP process. The experimental results demonstrate that a MP3 decoder application with a 128kbps 44.1kHz input can run at 5.1MHz and the logic consumes only 22uW/MHz.