This paper presents the definition and implementation design of a low power data bus encoding scheme dedicated to system on chip video architectures. Trends in CMOS technologies focus the attention on the energy consumption issue related to on-chip global communication; this is especially true for data dominated applications such as video processing. Taking into account scaling effects a novel coupling-aware bus power model is used to investigate the statistical properties of video data collected in the system bus of a reference hardware/software H.263/MPEG-4 video coder architecture. The results of this analysis and the low complexity requirements drive the definition of a bus encoding scheme called CDSPBI (Coupling Driven Separated Partial Bus Invert), optimized ad-hoc for video data. A VLSI implementation of the coding circuits completes the work with an area/delay/power characterization that shows the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of global power saving for a small circuit area overhead.

In this letter a low-complexity and low-power realization of the 2D discrete-cosine-transform and its inverse (DCT/IDCT) is presented. A VLSI circuit based on the Chen algorithm with the distributed arithmetic approach is described. Furthermore low-power design techniques, based on clock gating and data driven switching activity reduction, are used to decrease the circuit power consumption. To this aim, input signal statistics have been extracted from H.263/MPEG verification models. Finally, circuit performance is compared to known software solutions and dedicated full-custom ones.