A new class of computational RAM architectures for real-time MPEG-4 applications

This paper presents a new class of Computational RAM (C-RAM) architectures for real-time MPEG-4 applications. The proposed C-RAM architecture consists of an embedded SRAM and number of processing elements working in parallel to process the data stored in the memory. The processing elements are working as a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture. Each processing element is used to process one memory column. The proposed class of C-RAM architectures has been used for MPEG-4 block-based motion estimation, which is the most computational intensive task in the encoder. The proposed architecture has been designed, prototyped, and simulated for 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS TSMC technology. The simulation results show a promising performance of the proposed class of C-RAM architectures in video coding applications; it can process up to 126 frames per second with clock frequency 100 MHz.