I.McIC: a single-chip MPEG-2 video encoder for storage

I.McIC is a single-chip MPEG-2 video encoder for consumer storage applications. It supports both intra- and inter-coding mode to achieve bit rates from 5-15 Mb/s. It contains a recursive motion estimator, a programmable buffer/bit-rate controller, and a temporal noise-reduction stage. The resulting IC has 4.5×10⁶ transistors and measures 192 mm² in a 0.5-μm process. I.McIC was designed using mainly high-level synthesis tools. High-throughput fixed MPEG functions are performed by dedicated hardware. The remainder is performed in software by an embedded application-specific instruction-set processor with downloadable microcode to suit the IC for different applications of video coding