Energy Efficient System Design

Advances in portable computing through applications such as enhanced video, imaging and graphics performance and the ability to perform continuous non-invasive health monitoring are essential to making portable devices platforms for productivity and healthcare as well as entertainment. The high computational complexity of such applications necessitates system level innovations - including algorithms, architectures and circuit design - to enable “Moore’s Law” for energy-efficiency. This presentation discusses two portable computing applications - a reconfigurable processor for computational photography and a portable platform for medical imaging.

Computational photography applications have so far been software based, which adds significant complexity and does not support real-time processing. The reconfigurable processor implements High Dynamic Range imaging, Low-Light Enhancement and Glare Reduction. Power reduction techniques at all stages of the design, including algorithmic optimizations, highly parallel architecture and circuit design for low-voltage operation, significantly enhance energy-efficiency compared to software implementations on recent mobile processors, while enabling real-time processing.

Advances in computational photography and computer vision, coupled with efficient processing on portable multimedia devices, provide a unique opportunity for portable medical imaging. Extending and enhancing computer vision techniques, such as level set method based image segmentation, feature detection and registration, enable a portable platform for skin lesion detection and progression analysis of skin conditions. Algorithmic optimizations lead to significant performance enhancements and pave the way for energy-efficient hardware implementations for medical imaging.