60-MHz 240-mW MPEG-4 videophone LSI with 16-Mb embedded DRAM

A 240-mW single-chip MPEG-4 videophone LSI with a 16-Mb embedded DRAM is fabricated utilizing a 0.25-μm CMOS triple-well quad-metal technology. The videophone LSI is applied to 3GPP 3G-324M video-telephony standard for IMT-2000, and implements the MPEG-4 video SPL1 codec, the AMR speech codec, and the ITU-T H.223 Annex B multiplexing/demultiplexing at the same time. Three 16-bit multimedia-extended RISC processors, dedicated hardware accelerators, and a 16-Mb embedded DRAM are integrated on a 10.84 mm × 10.84 mm die. It also integrates camera, display, audio, and network interfaces required for a mobile video-phone terminal. In addition to conventional low-power techniques, such as clock gating and parallel operation, some new low-power techniques are also employed. These include an embedded DRAM with optimized configuration, a low-power motion estimator, and the adoption of the variable-threshold voltage CMOS (VT-CMOS). The MPEG-4 videophone LSI consumes 240 mW at 60 MHz, which is only 22% that for a conventional multichip design. Variable threshold voltage CMOS reduces standby leakage current to 26 μA, which is only 17% that for the conventional CMOS design.