A low power MPEG I/II layer 3 audio decoder

This paper describes a low power MPEG audio decoder called GENIE, which implements the full ISO/IEC 11172-3 layer 3 standard. To reduce the power consumption, we have applied tight task-based clock supervision and developed novel design schemes for Huffman decoding and equalizer. Using these approaches, GENIE can consume at most 18 mW at 14 MHz operating frequency and 1.8 V supply voltage, and this low power consumption is acceptable to the portable application. These schemes lead to a power reduction of 55% compared to other MPEG layer 3 audio decoders. GENIE was verified by simulation using the ISO/IEC 11172-4 compliance vectors and by FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) prototyping using real MP3 music bit streams.