A parallel memory architecture for video coding

To efficiently exploit the performance of single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architectures for video coding, a parallel memory architecture with power-of-two memory modules is proposed. It employs two novel skewing schemes to provide conflict-free access to adjacent elements (8-bit and 16-bit data types) or with power-of-two intervals in both horizontal and vertical directions, which were not possible in previous parallel memory architectures. Area consumptions and delay estimations are given respectively with 4, 8 and 16 memory modules. Under a 0.18-μm CMOS technology, the synthesis results show that the proposed system can achieve 230 MHz clock frequency with 16 memory modules at the cost of 19k gates when read and write latencies are 3 and 2 clock cycles, respectively. We implement the proposed parallel memory architecture on a video signal processor (VSP). The results show that VSP enhanced with the proposed architecture achieves 1.28× speedups for H.264 real-time decoding.