A Design Methodology for a Low-Power, Temperature-Aware SoC Developed for Medical Image Processors

Power and thermal considerations are becoming limiting factors for SoC designs as technology scales down. In this paper, a design methodology targeting a low-power and temperature-aware system is proposed. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and dynamic thermal management (DTM) techniques are included. In order to demonstrate its effectiveness, we present an ongoing SoC design project of an ultrasound medical image processor incorporating a computationally intensive image enhancement algorithm. In particular, we show how DVS and DTM are adopted. A novel adaptive body-bias circuit that mitigates thermal sensitivity of circuits is also introduced.