Low-Power Embedded Processor

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Project Statement

Statement of Need:

 Over the past few years, there has been a substantial growth in the use of portable computational and communication devices.  This growth of the demand for portable devices has led to the development of various kinds of embedded processors. One of the main design goals in these processors has been low power consumption.  This is especially the case when dealing with processors for battery-powered mobile devices. Low power consumption by the processor results in lower heat dissipation and longer battery life for these portable devices.

 Preliminary Requirements:

 Our design will involve the instantiation of the all the units of a generic embedded processor; however, we will emphasize a low-power implementation for the components and the overall design. The major units for the processor are the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), instruction decoder, control unit, register files, and program counter unit. Most of the units will be modeled using VHDL (VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit) Hardware Description Language), and finally a full custom VLSI (Very Large-Scale Integration) design will be created.

 Basic Limitations:

 The first limitation of this project is time. Since the project must be completed by the senior design day in May 2004, we will not be able to implement an elaborate and extensive instruction set for our processor. Our instruction set will be limited to basic arithmetic, logical, and memory I/O instructions and we will be implementing a 16-bit RISC processor.

 Another major limitation of design will be the performance of our processor. Since we are implementing a low-power processor, we will have to deal with some performance tradeoffs in our design process.

 Questions:

 How much performance will have to be sacrificed in order to create a practical low-power processor?

 How will the low-power aspect of the processor be implemented using VHDL and VLSI?

 How many instructions should the processor be able to execute?

 Which areas of the processor do we need to focus on in order to achieve the most power usage reduction?