Exploiting Fault Tolerance Towards Power Efficient Wireless Multimedia Applications
Amin Khajeh Djahromi, Ahmed M. Eltawil, Fadi Kurdahi · 2007
This paper exploits the inherent redundancy available in wireless multimedia systems to tradeoff system redundancy versus power consumption. It is shown that aggressive power management techniques result in hardware failures that are mostly localized to embedded memories. By isolating these errors and utilizing system level fault tolerance techniques, we show that a reduction in power of up to 38% is possible in an H.264 decoder. This is coupled with a reduction of up to 20% in the underlying 3GPP WCDMA modem. With the proliferation of wideband wireless systems, an inevitable result is increased demand on receiving high quality, high bandwidth video. Based on these trends, one can identify three main challenges facing mobile, multimedia and communication designers. The first and foremost is power consumption which is on the rise due to the complex algorithms necessary to enable broadband multimedia wireless communication in dispersive and highly mobile environments. The second challenge is technology related, where scaling is both an enabler and a limiter. It enables unprecedented integration, including the ability to integrate large memories on chip, with the downside being a penalty in leakage power as well as reliability. Finally, the third challenge, cost is typically a major restricting factor. Designers are faced with the daunting dilemma of generating high yielding architectures that integrate vast amounts of logic and memories in a minimum die size with minimum power consumption. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to designing systems that have built in inherent redundancy.