Reconfigurable CORDIC-based low-power DCT architecture based on data priority

This paper presents a low-power coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC)-based reconfigurable discrete cosine transform (DCT) architecture. The main idea of this paper is based on the interesting fact that all the computations in DCT are not equally important in generating the frequency domain outputs. Considering the importance difference in the DCT coefficients, the number of CORDIC iterations can be dynamically changed to efficiently tradeoff image quality for power consumption. Thus, the computational energy can be significantly reduced without seriously compromising the image quality. The proposed CORDIC-based 2-D DCT architecture is implemented using 0.13 μm CMOS process, and the experimental results show that our reconfigurable DCT achieves power savings ranging from 22.9% to 52.2% over the CORDIC-based Loeffler DCT at the cost of minor image quality degradations.