A motion compensation system with a high efficiency reference frame pre-fetch scheme for QFHD H.264/AVC decoding

Abstract

Motion Compensation (MC) is the computation bottleneck in H.264/AVC decoding and it dominates DRAM traffic. To alleviate computation loading, we employ two interpolation engines and fully utilize them in both P and B slices. Compared with a traditional separate 1-D interpolation engine, our proposed approach can reduce 79% of average computation latency. To reduce memory traffic, we propose a High Efficiency Reference Frame Pre-Fetch Scheme (HERPS) that saves 91% of multiple reference frame memory access cycles by rearranging access patterns. The overall design costs 117K gates when running at 200MHz and supports up to the QFHD (3840x2160) at 30 frames per second (fps) using a 128-bit DRAM memory system. ©2008 IEEE.