Low Complexity Architecture Design of H.264 Predictive Pixel Compensator for HDTV Application

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity architecture design of H.264 predictive pixel compensator (PPC) for HDTV application. In intra prediction, we propose a shared adder-based architecture style that supports all of the 17 intra prediction modes, and reduce computational complexity in the I4MB prediction mode 3~8 up to 50% computation. Besides, we have also proposed the distributed memory access to improve the HW usage. As well as, it can be used to reduce the memory size for buffering the neighboring pixels. In inter prediction, we can save about 48% of external memory bandwidth by the data reused through the hybrid block size memory access. Adopting the mixed six-tap FIR filter architecture to design luma interpolation, we can efficiently reduce the hardware cost up to 27%. The implemental result shows the hardware cost of the proposed design is about 60854 gates under a TSMC 0.18mum CMOS technology, which achieves the real-time processing requirement for HD-1080 format video@30 Hz at the working frequency of 87 MHz