An adjustable power management for optimal power saving in LTE terminal baseband modem

Abstract

Long term evolution (LTE) of 3GPP provides high bandwidth for data transfer. In the viewpoint of the LTE terminal baseband modem chip, these high data rates require more complex logics and memories than previous baseband modem chips in preceding technologies such as Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), and High Speed Packet Access (HSPA). It may exhaust user equipment (UE)'s battery power quickly. Thus, LTE provides an enhanced discontinuous reception (DRX) to extend the UE's battery lifetime. In this work, we propose an adjustable power management using a hierarchical cascaded power gating (HCPG) and a hierarchical multi-level clock gating (HMLCG) with special regard for DRX framework. The test results from the designed ASIC show that optimal power saving was achieved by using the proposed adjustable power management.