Using hardware parallelism for reducing power consumption in video streaming applications

Reconfigurable technology fits for real-time video streaming applications. It is considered as a promising solution due to the offered performance per watt compared to other technologies. Since FPGA evolved, several techniques at different design levels starting from the circuit-level up to the system-level were proposed to reduce the power consumption of the FPGA devices. In this paper, we present a flexible parallel hardware-based architecture in conjunction with frequency scaling as a technique for reducing power consumption in video streaming applications. In this work, we derived equations to ease the calculation for the level of parallelism and the maximum depth for the FIFOs used for clock domain crossing. Accordingly, a design space was formed including all the design alternatives for the application. The preferable design alternative is selected in aware of how much hardware it costs and what power reduction goal it can satisfy. We used Xilinx Zynq ZC706 evaluation board to implement two video streaming applications: Video downscaler (1:16) and AES encryption algorithm to verify our approach. The experimental results showed up to 19.6% power reduction for the video downscaler and up to 5.4% for the AES encryption.