Controlled timing-error acceptance for low energy IDCT design

In embedded digital signal processing (DSP) systems, quality is set by a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) floor. Conventional digital design strategies guarantee timing correctness of all operations, which leaves large quality margins in practical systems and sacrifices energy efficiency. This paper presents techniques to significantly improve energy efficiency by shaping the quality-energy tradeoff achievable via V_DD scaling. In an unoptimized design, such scaling leads to rapid loss of quality due to the onset of timing errors. We introduce techniques that modify the behavior of the early and worst timing error offenders to allow for larger V_DD reduction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques on a 2D-IDCT design. The design was synthesized using a 45nm standard cell library. The experiments show that up to 45% energy savings can be achieved at a cost of 10dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). The resulting PSNR remains above 30dB, which is a commonly accepted value for lossy image and video compression. Achieving such energy savings by direct V_DD scaling without the proposed transformations results in a 35dB PSNR loss. The overhead for the needed control logic is less than 3% of the original design.