Fast and Power Efficient Heapsort IP for Image Compression Application

We present a hardware architecture of a heapsort algorithm, the sorting is employed in a subband coding block of a wavelet-based image coder termed Öktem image coder [1]. Although this coder provides good image quality, the sorting is time consuming, and is application specific, as the sorting is repetitively used for different volume of data in the subband coding, thus a simple hardware implementation with fixed sorting capacity will be difficult to scale during runtime. To tackle this problem, the time/power efficiency and the sorting size flexibility have to be taken in to account. We proposed an improved FPGA heapsort architecture based on Zabołotny's work [2] as an IP accelerator of the image coder. We present a configurable architecture by using adaptive layer enable elements so the sorting capacity could be adjusted during runtime to efficiently sort different amount of data. With the adaptive memory shutdown, our improved architecture provides up to 20.9% power reduction on the memories compared to the baseline implementation. Moreover, our architecture provides 13x speedup compared to ARM CortexA9.