Robust and energy-efficient DSP systems via output probability processing

This paper proposes to employ error statistics of nanoscale circuit fabrics to design robust energy-efficient digital signal processing (DSP) systems. Architectural level error statistics are exploited to generate probability or the reliability of each output bit of a DSP kernel. The proposed technique is referred to here as bit-level a posteriori probability processing (BLAPP). Energy efficiency and robustness of a 2D discrete cosine transform (2D-DCT) image codec employing BLAPP is studied. Simulations in a commercial 45 nm CMOS process show that BLAPP provides up to 14X improvement in robustness, and 25% power savings over conventional 2D-DCT codec design.