• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.77-83
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• 2004

In low-power VLSI systems, it is effective to suppress leakage current by shutting down megablocks in idle states. Recently, multi-threshold voltage CMOS (MTCMOS) is widely accepted to shutdown power supply. However, it requires short wake-up time as operating frequency increases. This causes large current surge during wake-up process, and it often leads to system malfunction due to severe Power line noise. In this paper, a novel wake-up scheme is proposed to solve this problem. It exploits pipelined wake-up strategy in several stages that reduces maximum current on the power line and its corresponding power line noise. To evaluate its efficiency, the proposed scheme was applied to a multiplier block in the Compact Flash memory controller chip. Power line noise in shutdown and wake-up process was simulated and analyzed. From the simulation results, the proposed scheme was proven to greatly reduce the power line noise compared with conventional schemes.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.95-104
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• 2004

This paper propose a motion estimator architecture to reduce the power consumption of the most-power-consuming motion estimation method when designing multimedia SoC with deep submicron technologies below 0.13${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$. The proposed architecture considers both dynamic and static power consumption so that it is suitable for large leakage process technologies, while conventional architectures consider only dynamic power consumption. Consequently, it is suitable for mobile information terminals such as mobile videophone where efficient power management is essential. It exploits full search method for simple hardware implementation. It also exploits early break-off method to reduce dynamic power consumption. To reduce static power consumption, megablock shutdown method considering power line noise is also employed. To evaluate the proposed architecture when applied multimedia SoC, system-level control flow and low-power control algorithm are developed and the power consumption was calculated based on thor From the simulation results, power consumption was reduced to about 60%. Considering the line width reduction and increased leakage current due to heat dissipation in chip core, the proposed architecture shows steady power reduction while it goes worse in conventional architectures.