Discussed here is reduction of power dissipation for multi-media LSIs. First, both active power dissipation Pat and stand-by power dissipation Pst for both CMOS LSIs and GaAs LSIs are summarized. Then, general technologies for reducing Pat are discussed. Also reviewed are a wide variety of approaches (i.e., parallel and pipeline schemes, Chen's fast DCT algorithms, hierarchical search scheme for motion vectors, etc.) for reduction of Pat. The last part of the paper focuses on reduction of Pst. Reducing both Pat and Pst requires that both throughput and active chip areas be either maintained or improved.

A low power consumption 16-bit fixed point Digital Signal Processor (DSP) has been developed to realize a half-rate CODEC for the Personal Digital Cellular (PDC) system. Dual datapath architecture has been employed to execute multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations with a high degree of efficiency. With this architecture. 86.3% of total MAC operations in the Pitch Synchronous Innovation Code Excited Linear Prediction (PSI-CELP) program are executed in parallel, so that total instruction cycles are reduced by 23.1%. The area overhead for the dual datapath architecture is only 3.0% of the total area. Furthermore, in order to reduce power consumption, circuit design techniques are also extensively applied to RAMs. ROMs, and clock circuits, which consume the great majority of power. By reducing the number of precharging bit lines, a power reduction of 49.8% is achieved in RAMs, and above 40% in ROMs. By applying gated clock to clock lines, a power reduction of 5.0% is achieved in the DSP that performs the PSI-CELP algorithm. The DSP is fabricated in 0.5 µm single-poly, double-metal CMOS technology. The PSI-CELP algorithm for the PDC half-rate CODEC can operate at 22.5 MHz instruction frequency and 1.6 V supply voltage. resulting in a low-power consumption of 28 mW.

Discussed here is progress achieved in the development of video codec LSIs.First, the amount of computation for various standards, and signal handling capability (throughput) and power dissipation for video codec LSIs are described. Then, general technologies for improving throughtput are briefly summarized. The paper also reviews three approaches (i.e., video signal processor, building block and monolithic codes) for implementing video codes standards. The second half of the paper discusses various high-throughput technologies developed for programmable Video Signal Processor (VSP) LSIs. A number of VSP LSIs are introduced, including the world's first programmable VSP, developed in February 1987 and a monolithic codec ship, built in February 1993 that is sufficient in itself for the construction of a video encoder for encoding full-CIF data at 30 frames per second. Technologies for reduction of power dissipation while keeping maintaining throughput are also discussed.

This paper will describe an overview on several design issues and solutions for the realization of MPEG2 encoder &decoder LSIs. ULSI technology and video-coding specific design have been able to actualize an MPEG2 encoder &decoder LSI with realtime capability, flexibility and cost effectiveness, though MPEG2 processing at MP＠ML (Main Profile and Main Level) requires an enormous computation power of 10-200 GOPS depending on the motion estimation algorithm and a search range. Video coding processors, whose performance has been enhanced at the rate of one order per 3 years, have reached the performance level required to implement MPEG2 encoding using multiple chip configuration. This has been achieved by a hybrid architecture with video-oriented RISC and hardware engine optimized for coding algorithms. Intensive circuit optimization was carried out for transform coding such as DCT and predictive coding with motion estimation. Now cost effective MPEG2 decoders have begun to penetrate the multimedia market. There are two main design issues. One is the architectural and circuit design which minimizes the silicon area and power dissipation. The other is external DRAM control which makes use of DRAM storage and band width efficiently to reduce the system cost. Also future trends in a deep submicron era will be discussed. A single chip MPEG2 MP＠ML encoder is expected to appear in the 0.25 micron era at the latest. An MPEG2 MP＠ML decoder could be compressed to an area of about 25 mm2.

This paper describes a new, low power 16-bit Digital Signal Processor (DSP). The DSP has a double-speed MAC mechanism, an accelerator for Viterbi decoding, and a block floating section which contribute to lower power consumption. The double-speed MAC can perform two multiply and accumulate operations in one instruction cycle. Since MAC operations are so common in digital signal processing, this mechanism can reduce the average clock frequency of the DSP resulting in lower power consumption. The Viterbi accelerator and block floating circuitry also reduce the clock frequency by minimizing the number of required cycles needed to be executed. The DSP was fabricated using a 0.8 µm CMOS 2-aluminum layer process technology to integrate 644 K transistors on a 9.30 mm9.09 mm die. It can realize an 11.2 kbps VSELP speech CODEC while consuming only 70 mW at 3.5 V Vdd.

There are two approaches to implementing the international standard video coding algorithms such as H.261 and MPEG: a programmable DSP approach and a building block approach. The advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed here in detail, and the video coding algorithms and required throughput are also summarized. For more complex standard such as MPEG-, VLSI architecuture became more sophisticated. The DSP approach incorporates special processing engines and the building block approach integrates general-purpose microprocessors. Both approaches are capable of MPEG- NTSC coding in a single chip. Reduction of power consumption is a key issue for video LSIs. Architectures and circuits that reduce the supply voltage while maintaining throughput are summarized. A 0.25-µm, 3-GOPS, 0.5-W, SIMD-VSP for portable MPEG- systems could be made by using architecture-driven voltage scaling as well as feature-size scaling and SOI devices.

This review presents research topics and results on digital signal processing in the last twenty years in Japan. The main parts of the review consist of design and analysis of multidimensional digital filters, multiple-valued logic circuits and number systems for signal processing, and general purpose signal processors.

This paper proposes a hierarchical Digital Signal Processor (DSP) Code Generator VIRGO for large scale general signal processing algorithms. Hierarchical structured Vectorized Signal Flow Graph (V-SFG) description is used as input specifications. Ths DSP independent optimization procedure for both the program size and the execution time is performed each module by each hierarchically with regard to operation order, memory assignment and register allocation. The efficient code generation is demonstrated by comparing both instruction steps and dynamic steps of a practical ADPCM encoder/decoder with a conventional method.