Hung-Chi Fang

A 1.3TOPS H.264/AVC single-chip encoder for HDTV applications

An H.264/AVC encoder is implemented on a 31.72mm/sup 2/ die with 0.18/spl mu/m CMOS technology. A four-stage macroblock pipelined architecture encodes 720p 30f/s HDTV videos in real time at 108MHz. The encoded video quality is competitive with reference software requiring 3.6TOPS on a general-purpose processor-based platform.

Parallel 4/spl times/4 2D transform and inverse transform architecture for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264

Transform coding has been widely used in video coding standards. In this paper, a hardware architecture for accelerating transform coding operations in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 is presented. This architecture calculates 4 inputs in parallel by fast algorithms described previously. The transpose operations are implemented by a register array with directional transfers. This architecture has been mapped into a 4 /spl times/ 4 multiple transforms unit and synthesized in TSMC 0.35um technology. The multiple transform processor can process 320M pixels/sec at 80Mhz for all 4 /spl times/ 4 transforms used in MPEG-4 AVC/ H.264.

Advances in Hardware Architectures for Image and Video Coding - A Survey

This paper provides a survey of state-of-the-art hardware architectures for image and video coding. Fundamental design issues are discussed with particular emphasis on efficient dedicated implementation. Hardware architectures for MPEG-4 video coding and JPEG 2000 still image coding are reviewed as design examples, and special approaches exploited to improve efficiency are identified. Further perspectives are also presented to address the challenges of hardware architecture design for advanced image and video coding in the future.

High speed memory efficient EBCOT architecture for JPEG2000

This paper presents a high speed, memory efficient architecture of embedded block coding with optimized truncation (EBCOT) tier-1 in JPEG2000. By parallel coding all the bitplanes, the state variable memory can be eliminated. The proposed architecture can process 50 M coefficients per second at 100 MHz, which can realtime encode 720p resolution of HDTV picture format at 30 fps.

81MS/s JPEG2000 single-chip encoder with rate-distortion optimization

An 81MS/s JPEG 2000 single-chip encoder is implemented on a 5.5mm/sup 2/ die using 0.25/spl mu/m CMOS technology. This IC can encode HDTV 720p resolution at 30 frames/s in real time. The rate-distortion optimized chip encodes tile size of 128/spl times/128, code block size of 64/spl times/64, and image size up to 32K/spl times/32K.

Parallel embedded block coding architecture for JPEG 2000

This paper presents a parallel architecture for the Embedded Block Coding (EBC) in JPEG 2000. The architecture is based on the proposed word-level EBC algorithm. By processing all the bit planes in parallel, the state variable memories for the context formation (CF) can be completely eliminated. The length of the FIFO (first-in first-out) between the CF and the arithmetic encoder (AE) is optimized by a reconfigurable FIFO architecture. To reduce the hardware cost of the parallel architecture, we proposed a folded AE architecture. The parallel EBC architecture can losslessly process 54 MSamples/s at 81 MHz, which can support HDTV 720p resolution at 30 frames/s.

A 5mW MPEG4 SP encoder with 2D bandwidth-sharing motion estimation for mobile applications

A 5mW MPEG4 SP encoder is implemented on a 7.7mm2 die in 0.18mum CMOS technology. It encodes CIF 30frames/s in real-time at 9.5MHz using 5mW at 1.3V and VGA 30frames/s at 28.5MHz uses 18mW at 1.4V. This chip employs a 2D bandwidth-sharing ME design, content-aware DCT/IDCT, and clock gating techniques to minimize power consumption

Performance analysis of hardware oriented algorithm modifications in H.264

H.264 [Committee Draft of Joint Video Specification, July 2002] is initiated by ITU-T as H.26L and will become a joint standard of ITU-T and MPEG. The coding complexity of H.264 is much higher than MPEG-4 simple profile and advance simple profile algorithms. In order to achieve real-time encoding, hardware implementation is required. The original test model of H.264 (JM) [Joint Video Team, August 2002] is designed to achieve high coding performance. Some algorithms of the test model require lots of operations with little coding efficiency improvement. And some algorithms create data dependencies that prevent parallel hardware accelerations. This paper presents analysis of H.264 video coding algorithm in a hardware-oriented viewpoint. Intra prediction, Hadamard transform and motion estimation algorithms are reviewed and modified to a hardware friendly configuration. The rate distortion penalties of these modifications are simulated and shown in this paper.

High-performance JPEG 2000 encoder with rate-distortion optimization

An 81 MSamples/s JPEG 2000 single-chip encoder is implemented on 5.5 mm2 area using 0.25-mum CMOS technology. This IC can losslessly encode HDTV 720p resolution at 30 frames/s in real time. Three techniques are adopted: line-based discrete wavelet transform, parallel embedded block coding, and precompression rate-distortion optimization. The line-based discrete wavelet transform achieves the minimum external memory access, while the internal memory is reduced by a proper memory access scheme. The parallel embedded block coding increases the throughput and reduces the memory bandwidth with similar hardware cost comparing to conventional architectures. By accurately estimating bit rates, the precompression rate-distortion optimization reduces the required computational power and processing time of the embedded block coding since the code-blocks are truncated before compression. Experimental results show that this encoder has the highest throughput with the smallest area compared with other designs in the literature

Algorithm analysis and architecture design for HDTV applications - a look at the H.264/AVC video compressor system

In this article, we suggest some techniques to design the H.264/AVC video coding system for HDTV applications. The design exploration is made according to software profiling. The design considerations of system scheduling and pipelining are discussed followed by the architecture optimization of the significant modules. The efficient H.264/AVC video coding system is achieved by combining these techniques