Low power design for MPEG-2 video decoder

The I/O power consumption in an MPEG-2 decoder is significant because of the wide connection with large capacitances to the frame buffer. To reduce the power dissipation on the memory bus, the Gray code encoding scheme is proposed to increase the correlation of the image data transferred on the bus. The bit switching probability in the re-coded data will then decrease and in turn the bus power consumption will be reduced. Combined with the proposed bus arbitration and scheduling scheme proposed in this paper, 22% reduction of power dissipation may be achieved.