Low power storage exploration for H.263 video decoder

Abstract

We describe a power exploration methodology for data-dominated applications using a H.263 video decoding demonstrator application. The starting point for our exploration is a C specification of the video decoder, available in the public domain from Telenor Research. We have transformed the data transfer scheme in the specification and have optimized the distributed memory organization. This results in a memory architecture with significantly reduced power consumption. For the worst-case mode using predicted and bi-directional (PB) frames, memory power consumption is reduced by a factor of 9. To achieve these results, we make use of our formalized high-level memory management methodology, partly supported in our ATOMIUM environment.