An 800-μW H.264 Baseline-Profile Motion Estimation Processor Core

Abstract

This paper describes an 800-μW H.264 baseline- profile motion estimation processor for portable video applications. It features a VLSI-oriented block partitioning strategy, a reconfigurable SIMD/systolic-array datapath architecture and a power-efficient novel SRAM circuit with a segmentation-free and horizontal/vertical accessibility. The proposed architecture can reconfigure datapath to either an SIMD or systolic array depending on processing flow. The segmentation-free access means concurrent accessibility to arbitrary consecutive pixels. The processor supports all the seven kinds of block modes, and can handle three reference frames for a VGA (640 × 480) 30-fps to QCIF (176 × 144) 15-fps sequences with a quarter-pixel accuracy. It integrates 3.3 million transistors, and occupies 2.8 × 3.1 mm2 in a 130-nm CMOS technology. The proposed processor achieves a power of 800 μW for QCIF 15-fps with one reference picture.