Platform-Based MPEG-4 SOC Design for Video Communications

An MPEG-4 video coding SOC design is presented in this paper. We adopt platform-based architecture with an embedded RISC core and efficient memory organization. A motion estimator supporting predictive diamond search and spiral full search is implemented for compromise between compression performance and design cost. The proposed data reuse scheme reduces required memory access bandwidth. For texture coding path, an interleaving DCT/IDCT scheduling with substructure sharing technique is proposed. Several key modules are integrated into an efficient platform in hardware/software co-design fashion. The cost-efficient video encoder SOC consumes 256.8 mW at 40 MHz and achieves real-time encoding of 30 CIF (352×288) frames per second.