Anawake: Signal-Based Power Management For Digital Signal Processing Systems

Single-chip, low-power, programmable digital signal processing sys- tems are capable of hosting complete speech processing applica- tions, while consuming a few milliwatts of average power. We present a power management architecture that decreases the av- erage power consumption of these systems to 3-10 microwatts, in applications where speech signals are present with a su!cien tly low duty cycle. In this architecture, a micropower analog signal processing system, Anawake, continuously analyzes the incoming signal, and controls the power consumption of the DSP system in a signal-dependent way. We estimate system power consumption for Anawake designs optimized for di" erent peak-speech-signal to average-background-noise ratios.