Low-Power Multimedia System Design by Aggressive Voltage Scaling

Mobile multimedia systems are growing in complexity and scalability and, correspondingly, in their implementation challenges. By design, these systems have built-in error resilience that has been exploited in many different compression and transmission schemes mainly as a quality tradeoff. This paper proposes a paradigm shift in utilizing error resilience in an application-aware method for reducing the power consumption of memories in such systems by aggressively scaling the supply voltage beyond what is currently considered as ??safe?? operating conditions while maintaining performance. Results on H.264 decoders show that power savings of more than 40% are possible.