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Implementing energy efficient embedded multimedia

2006; SPIE; Volume: 6074; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1117/12.659841

1996-756X

Olli Silvén, Tero Rintaluoma, Kari Jyrkkä,

Video Coding and Compression Technologies

Multimedia processing in battery powered mobile communication devices is pushing their computing power requirements to the level of desktop computers. At the same time the energy dissipation limit stays at 3W that is the practical maximum to prevent the devices from becoming too hot to handle. In addition, several hours of active usage time should be provided on battery power. During the last ten years the active usage times of mobile communication devices have remained essentially the same regardless of big energy efficiency improvements at silicon level. The reasons can be traced to the design paradigms that are not explicitly targeted to creating energy efficient systems, but to facilitate implementing complex software solutions by large teams. Consequently, the hardware and software architectures, including the operating system principles, are the same for both mainframe computer system and current mobile phones. In this paper, we consider the observed developments against the needs of video processing in mobile communication devices and consider means of implementing energy efficient video codecs both in hardware and software. Although inflexible, monolithic video acceleration hardware is an attractive solution, while software based codecs are becoming increasingly difficult to implement in an energy efficient manner due to increasing system complexity. Approaches that combine both the flexibility of software and energy efficiency of hardware remain to be seen.