Design of a Low Power Reconfigurable DSP with Fine-Grained Clock Gating

Recently, many digital signal processing(DSP) applications such as H.264, CDMA and MP3 are predominant tasks for modern high-performance portable devices. These applications are generally computation-intensive, and therefore, require quite complicated accelerator units to improve performance. Designing such specialized, yet fixed DSP accelerators takes lots of effort. Therefore, DSPs with multiple accelerators often have a very poor time-to-market and an unacceptable area overhead. To avoid such long time-to-market and high-area overhead, dynamically reconfigurable DSP architectures have attracted a lot of attention lately. Dynamically reconfigurable DSPs typically employ a multi-functional DSP accelerator which executes similar, yet different multiple kinds of computations for DSP applications. With this type of dynamically reconfigurable DSP accelerators, the time to market reduces significantly. However, integrating multiple functionalities into a single IP often results in excessive control and area overhead. Therefore, delay and power consumption often turn out to be quite excessive. In this thesis, to reduce power consumption of dynamically reconfigurable IPs, we propose a novel fine-grained clock gating scheme, and to reduce size of dynamically reconfigurable IPs, we propose a compact multiplier-less multiplication unit where shifters and adders carry out constant multiplications.