Configurable Power/Quality-Aware Hardware Design for the AV1 Directional Intra Frame Prediction

Abstract

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is a royalty-free video format launched in 2018 that includes several tools to achieve high coding efficiency, but also presents a high computational cost. Because of this, hardware solutions are a good alternative to speed up the encoding process and enable real-time processing. This work presents a configurable hardware design for the AV1 directional intra-frame prediction. Two operation modes were defined on a software-based analysis and implemented in the architecture: the High Quality mode, which offers high coding efficiency, and the Low Power mode, which offers a power dissipation 84.4% lower in comparison to the first mode at the cost of a compression efficiency loss of 2.48%. The proposed architecture is capable of operating in real-time for video resolutions of up to 4K@60fps. When synthesized for the TSMC 40nm technology and operating at a target frequency of 1,902 MHz for 4K@60fps videos, the High Quality and the Low Power modes presented a power dissipation of 631.76 mW and 82.76 mW, respectively.