An adaptive selection of an SRAM cell size for power reduction in an H.264/AVC encoder

Abstract

Voltage scaling is a widely used technique to reduce a power consumption of a static random access memory (SRAM) but it may cause an SRAM failure. In order to reduce power consumption without significant quality loss, this paper proposes a novel method to select the appropriate SRAM cell sizes in an H.264/AVC encoder according to the sensitivities to the quality loss caused by SRAM failures. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves a significant PSNR improvement, an average of 2.2dB at 900 mV operation, compared to the identical selection of SRAM cell sizes.