The PREST Project

PREST (Power REduction for System Technology) is an EU funded project (EP25242) comprising collaborative work from Mitel Semiconductor Limited, Queen's University Belfast, the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield. Each of the University partners has their own particular novel approach to low power design and these techniques are being applied to a current commercial design of Mitel's in order to assess their impact. The design chosen is a Viterbi decoder.

An asynchronous approach to achieving lower power in the Viterbi decoder has been taken by the APT group at Manchester University. As part of the PREST project, the University undertook a survey on Asynchronous Design Techniques and Arithmetic Styles. This is available here.

An overview of the decoder operation and a description of the demonstrator specification is available here. while the system constructed is described in more detail here.

For more details of the APT work including existing low power design work, see the publications section of our website.