The Effect of FPGA Granularity on Video Codec Implementations

This paper presents an investigation of LUT-based FPGAs regarding their suitability for a particular application area using circuits which can be described in a typical HDL like Verilog or VHDL, not only synthetic benchmarks. The H.263 video codec has been chosen as benchmark example. In order to compare different FPGA architectures, a generic FPGA model and architecture independent modelling software are used. It is shown that coarse grain FPGAs give better area-speed trade-offs for large circuits whereas more fine grain devices are better suited for smaller designs.