Number representations for reducing switched capacitance in subband coding

In low power VLSI design, fixed point number representations are standard. For some signal processing applications, however, achieving sufficient dynamic range with fixed point may lead to computations utilizing more precision than necessary. In such cases, trading precision for dynamic range through the use of floating point and logarithmic number system representations can potentially provide power savings. This is demonstrated for a subband speech coding application using architectural-level capacitance modeling.