Energy-efficient Hardware Accelerators for the SA-DCT and Its Inverse

Abstract

The explosive growth of the mobile multimedia industry has accentuated the need for efficient VLSI implementations of the associated computationally demanding signal processing algorithms. In particular, the short battery life caused by excessive power consumption of mobile devices has become the biggest obstacle facing truly mobile multimedia. We propose novel hardware accelerator architectures for two of the most computationally demanding algorithms of the MPEG-4 video compression standard--the forward and inverse shape adaptive discrete cosine transforms (SA-DCT/IDCT). These accelerators have been designed using general low-energy design philosophies at the algorithmic/architectural abstraction levels. The themes of these philosophies are avoiding waste and trading area/performance for power and energy gains. Each core has been synthesised targeting TSMC 0.09 mm TCBN90LP technology, and the experimental results presented in this paper show that the proposed cores improve upon the prior art.