VCAS: Viewing context aware power-efficient mobile video embedded memory

Mobile devices have become the most important way to deliver the videos. Experience and battery life are two major considerations for the mobile users. To be the first time, this paper relates these two together and presents a Viewing Context Aware SRAM (VCAS). The viewing contexts significantly influence the user experience and in the worse context, users have higher tolerance to the video noise. Based on this, we introduce hardware noise in high-tolerance viewing surroundings to achieve more power savings. To meet the low area constraint of mobile devices, we develop an efficient hardware scheme to implement VCAS which induces negligible area overhead. The experimental results based on 45-nm CMOS technology show that, as compared to the conventional SRAM design, VCAS can achieve 32.6% power savings without perceivable quality loss.