Battery-friendly design of signal processing algorithms

Portable systems today are designed with lowering the energy consumption as the primary design metric. This is unfortunate, since maximizing battery lifetime is a more appropriate metric, and lowering energy does not necessarily mean improving battery lifetime. We first show how to design battery-friendly implementations of common signal processing kernels such as FIR filters and FFT. The basic idea is to generate a load profile that results in better battery behavior. Next, we demonstrate how frequency scaling can be used effectively to improve the battery behavior of an application such as MPEG2.

1. INTRODUCTION

Use of portable devices in many signal processing and communication applications is on the rise. These are designed with reduction in energy consumption as the prime design metric, The assumption is that reducing the energy consumption of the system will increase the lifetime of the battery. This is not necessarily true, since two implementations that have comparable energy consumption can have very different battery performance, In this paper we present an approach to designing battery-friendly versions of signal processing algorithms so as to maximize the battery lifetime.