A flexible HEVC intra mode decision hardware for 8kx4k real time encoder

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the next generation of video coding standard. Comparing with 9 intra prediction modes in H.264, 35 prediction modes are adopted in HEVC, which significantly increase the encoding complexity, especially for hardware implementation. This paper proposes a flexible HEVC intra mode decision hardware only employing the original pixels. With TSMC 65nm CMOS technology, the proposed mode decision accelerator achieves 622MHz working frequency at the cost of 59.5K gates. Our design can fulfill the throughput requirement of 7680×4320@30fps real time encoding with acceptable performance loss.