Viewer-Aware Intelligent Efficient Mobile Video Embedded Memory

Abstract

Embedded memory is a critical component in today’s mobile video processing systems, increasingly dominating power consumption and shortening battery life of mobile devices. Traditional hardware-level power optimization techniques usually come with significant implementation overhead to solve the memory failure problem during low-voltage operations. This paper presents a novel mobile video memory to exploit the power saving opportunities provided by a viewer experience under environmental visual interference. The viewing contexts, in particular the ambient luminance, significantly influence the quality of the viewer experience, and in the context with higher luminance levels, mobile users have higher tolerance to the video degradation. Accordingly, the memory failures can be introduced adaptively to achieve power savings without influencing the viewer experience. To meet the silicon area constraint in mobile devices, a simple but an efficient hardware implementation scheme is developed to minimize area overhead. The experimental results based on a 45-nm CMOS technology show that, as compared with the conventional memory design, the proposed technique can achieve up to 48% power savings with good perceivable quality and negligible implementation overhead.