The development of mobile multimedia devices follows the platform-based design methodology in which IP cores are the building blocks. In the context of mobile devices there is a concern of battery lifetime which leads to the need of energyefficient IP cores. This paper presents an energy-efficient FDCT/IDCT configurable IP core. Synthesis for 90 nm resulted in 50 MHz as maximum frequency and 1.66 mW as total power, achieving a throughput of 188.2 Mpixels/s, which is enough to process two HDTV@1080p videos in real time. The IP core architecture is based on Massimino's algorithm, which was chosen for its accuracy and parallelism. The exploration of its parallelism resulted in a fully-combinational 1-D FDCT/IDCT configurable datapath. In addition, the IP core is IEEE-1180 compliant. Comparisons with related work, in terms of energy efficiency (mJ/Mpixel), revealed that our architecture is at least 64% more efficient than other DCT architectures.

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The development of mobile multimedia devices follows the platform-based design methodology in which IP cores are the building blocks. In the context of mobile devices there is a concern of battery lifetime which leads to the need of energy-efficient IP cores. This paper presents four energy-efficient FDCT/IDCT configurable IP cores. These architectures are based on Massimino’s algorithm, which was chosen due to its high accuracy and parallelism. The four architectures were built by combining fully-combinational or pipelined datapaths, using either a single or two 1-D DCT blocks with a transpose buffer that assures the optimal minimum latency of eight cycles. Synthesis results for 90nm showed that our most efficient architecture, which uses two pipelined 1-D blocks, achieved 250 MHz as maximum frequency at a total power of 14.03 mW. Such frequency was enough to process 16x 1080p@30fps videos in real time (nearly 2 GigaPixels/s). Comparisons with related work, in terms of energy efficiency (μJ/MPixels), revealed that our most energy-efficient architecture is at least 2 times as efficient as other DCT architectures. Moreover, the four designed architectures were also synthesized by using common low-power techniques. These results showed that pipelined versions at high throughput tend to take more benefit from using Low-Vdd and High-Vt combined than the combinational ones, thus becoming the most energy efficient.