Hardware Design of DC/CFL Intra-Prediction Decoder for the AV1 Codec

Abstract

This paper presents a dedicated hardware design for the DC and Chroma from Luma (CFL) intra-prediction modes of AV1 decoder. The hardware was designed to reach real-time when processing UHD 4K videos. The AV1 codec is an open-source and royalties-free video coding, which was developed by the AOMedia group, this group is composed of multiple companies like Google, Netflix, AMD, ARM, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Mozilla and others. The proposed solution can support all 19 block sizes allowed in AV1 encoder, being able to process UHD 4K videos at 60 frames per second. The DC/CFL modules were synthesized to the TSMC 40 nm cells library targeting the frequency of 132.1 MHz. Synthesis results show the proposed hardware used 89.39 Kgates and a power dissipation of 7.96mW.