A low-power memory architecture with application-aware power management for motion & disparity estimation in Multiview Video Coding

A low-power architecture for an on-chip multi-banked video memory for motion and disparity estimation in Multiview Video Coding is proposed. The memory organization (size, banks, sectors, etc.) is driven by an extensive analysis of memory-usage behavior for various 3D-video sequences. Considering a multiple-sleep state model, an application-aware power management scheme is employed to reduce the leakage energy of the on-chip memory. The knowledge of motion and disparity estimation algorithm in conjunction with video properties are considered to predict the memory requirements of each Macroblock. A cost function is evaluated to determine an appropriate sleep mode for the idle memory sectors, while considering the wakeup overhead (latency and energy). The complete motion and disparity estimation architecture is implemented in a 65nm low power IBM technology. The experiments (for various test video sequences) demonstrate that our architecture provides up to 80% leakage energy reduction compared to state-of-the-art. Our scheme processes motion and disparity estimation of four HD1080p views encoding at 30fps with a power consumption of 57mW.