Program transformation strategies for memory size and power reduction of pseudoregular multimedia subsystems

Abstract

A program transformation strategy is presented that is able to reduce the buffer size and power consumption for a relatively large class of (pseudo)regular data-dominated signal processing algorithms. Our methodology is targeted toward an implementation on programmable processors, but most of the principles remain valid for a custom processor implementation. As power and area cost are crucial in the context of embedded multimedia applications, this strategy can be very valuable. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated on a representative high-speed video processing algorithm for which we obtain a substantial reduction of the area and power consumption compared to the classical approaches.