Low-power signal processing system design for wireless applications

Abstract

Our ability to work with most multimedia data has been confined to a wired environment, requiring both the data source and the receiver to be physically connected to a power supply and a wired communication link. This article describes the design principles applicable to wireless signal processing systems, using a portable video-on-demand system as an example. The discussion focuses on both the algorithm and circuit design techniques developed for implementing a low-power video compression/decompression system at power levels that are two orders of magnitude below existing solutions. This low-power video compression system not only provides a compression efficiency similar to industry standards, but also maintains a high degree of error tolerance to guard against the transmission errors often encountered in wireless communication.