Low power showdown: comparison of five DSP platforms implementing an LPC speech codec
D. Hwang, Cimarron Mittelsteadt, Ingrid M.R. Verbauwhede · 2002
An identical LPC speech coder has been implemented on a set of signal processing specific implementation platforms. The main goal of this experiment was to compare energy consumption. In addition, area/memory requirements and design time are also compared. The coder was first designed in floating-point C. Then, the fixed-point wordlengths were determined. Depending on the platform, either compiled code was generated, assembly code written or a Verilog/VHDL design was created. The platforms reported in this paper include the DSP processors TI C55/spl times/, TI C54/spl times/, TI C6/spl times/ and the design environments Ocapi and A|RT Designer. Energy consumption ranged from 2 /spl mu/J to 288 /spl mu/J per speech frame. Upon scaling the results to the same technology, our results indicated that the lowest power DSP processor (TI C55/spl times/) still consumes a factor of four more energy than an application specific processor.