Low Power Design And Implementation Of A Digital Signal Processing Platform

Directed by the technology development in microelectronics, the processing capability ofembedded signal processing systems has been increased rapidly. However, while upgrading inperformance, the power consumption of embedded systems has raised dramatically. High powerconsumption not only increases the complexity of system design, but also affects the stabilityand reliability of embedded systems. Consequently, issues of power consumption and energyconsumption has been paid much more attention to, and power management and low powerdesign of high performance systems has become a hot issue.Systems spend quite a bit of time running with low workloads in practice, so measures mustbe teken to avoid unnecessary system power consumption. The fundament of power managementis to adjust systems’ work modes based on workloads so that systems would run in low powerconsumption mode while meeting performance requirements. To achieve this, reliable low poweroperating mechanisms should be implemented, operating status of important system componentsshould also be monitored, and an effective policy should be applied to manage systems’ powerconsumption.In this paper, firstly, several low power design techniques of high performance digitalsystems was introduced, and the power consumption characteristics of CMOS based intergratedcircuit.was analysed, then, a conclusion was made that the two main power optimizationprinciples were to make use of system idle and slowing down systems while meetingperformance requirements.Secondly, based on the two principles, several optimization mechanisms such as frequencyadjusting, power domain division, operating mode switching, board low performancecommunication link, power supply management module etc. were design and implemented on aTMS320C6678based digital signal processing system. With the help of these mechanisms, atime-out based power management software was designed and implemented on single nodeevaluation board.At last, a power consumption monitor using the technique of monitoring power supply’svoltage and current was implemented, and the implemented power optimization mechanisms wastested by the use of the monitor. The results showed that by applying these power optimizationmechanisms, there was a significant improvement on systems’ power consumption and energyconsumption performance.