A 1 V DSP for wireless communications

Modern cellular phones are placing increasingly stringent demands on battery life and, therefore, on the power dissipation of the embedded DSP circuitry. At the same time, greater computational throughput is being required of the DSP, for example to implement more sophisticated speech and channel coding algorithms. Earlier low-power DSPs were reported. However, further improvements in power and performance are required. This paper describes a full-function, 1.6M-transistor, fixed-point programmable DSP designed for wireless communication applications to address these dual constraints of lower power and higher throughput. This is achieved by operating at 1V and using a dual-V process to maintain high performance.