Real-Time Instruction-Cycle-Based Dynamic Voltage Scaling (iDVS) Power Management for Low-Power Digital Signal Processor (DSP) with 53% Energy Savings

Abstract

this paper presents an instruction-cycle-based dynamic voltage scaling (iDVS) power management strategy for a low-power processor design. The iDVS technique is fully compatible with conventional DVS scheduler algorithms. Furthermore, an additional iDVS design flow embedded in the standard cell lib flow is proposed to implement the iDVS-based DSP. In addition, the fast-response bidirectional asynchronous wave-pipeline (BAWP) digital low-dropout (LDO) regulator is also presented to improve the iDVS performance. The iDVS-based DSP chip implemented in an HH-NEC 0.18 mu m standard CMOS process demonstrates 53% energy savings over that without the iDVS technique.