Parallel enhanced low design effort H.264/AVC fractional motion estimation engine for Super Hi-Vision application

One super hi-vision (SHV) 4kx4k@60fps fractional motion estimation (FME) engine is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the mode reduction and edge detection techniques are adopted to filter out unpromising modes in the algorithm level. Secondly, two parallel improved schemes, called 16-pel scale processing and MB-split assignment, are given out in hardware level, which reduces design effort to only 217 MHz. Moreover, sub-sampling technique is adopted during SATD (sum-of-absolute-transformed-difference) generation, which saves 75% hardware cost. By using TSMC 0.18 um in worst work conditions (1.62 V, 125°C), our FME engine can achieve SHV 4kx4k@60fps real-time processing with 547.5 k gates hardware.