Low-power wireless video systems

This article presents the design principles for implementing low-power wireless video systems through the use of two examples, a single-chip digital video camera and a wireless video-on-demand system. The discussion focuses on the architectural and circuit techniques developed specifically for silicon integration of high-performance low-power wireless video systems. The proposed single-chip digital camera incorporates a parallel architecture to perform MPEG-2 encoding in real time, while the video-on-demand system employs an error-resilient compression algorithm to guard against the transmission errors often encountered in wireless communication. Both wireless video systems, one for encoding and the other for decoding, dissipate only tens of milliwatts of power, achieving a power reduction two orders of magnitude below standard solutions.