A power-aware quad-voltage H.264 encoder chip for wireless panoramic endoscope applications

Voltage scaling is an efficient way to reduce dynamic power consumption for digital circuits. In this paper, a hierarchical multiple voltage (HMulti-Vdd) technology is proposed to design a power-aware H.264 intra-frame encoder for wireless panoramic endoscope applications. The proposed design adopts quad supply voltages to reduce power consumption without performance degradation. A progressive voltage difference technique is adopted in the proposed design for preventing from the penalty from using level shifters on performance and power consumption. The quad-voltage test chip has been successfully validated and has shown a 40% average reduction of power consumption, as compared to the same design using a single supply voltage.