Reconfigurable Motion Estimation Engine for H.264

A Complete Framework for Motion Estimation Algorithm Development.

The Mobility processor is a reconfigurable ASIP designed to execute user-defined block-matching motion estimation algorithms optimized for hybrid video codecs such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 AVC and Microsoft VC-1. The ability to program search algorithm to be used, and to reconfigure the underlying hardware that it will execute on, combines to give an extremely flexible motion estimation processing platform.

A toolset has been developed that enables the algorithm designed access to the hardware features without any knowledge of the  processor micro-architecture. The toolset IDE is a fully

integrated environment composed of a compiler, assembler, cycle accurate model and RTL export. The algorithm designer can create a new algorithm for the required application using typical C constructs (Estimo C) such as for, while loops and if-else constructs. The compiler automatically recognizes the search points that correspond to fractional-pel searches and generates the correct instructions.