A high-performance reconfigurable VLSI architecture for vbsme in H.264

VBSME (variable block size motion estimation) is adopted in the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard. In order to increase the hardware utilization for VBSME with FSBMA (full search block matching algorithm), this paper proposed a new high-performance reconfigurable VLSI architecture to support "meander"-like scan format for a high data reuse of search area. The architecture can support the three data flows of the scan format through a reconfigurable computing array and a memory of the search area. The computing array can achieve 100% processing element (PE) utilization and can reuse the smaller blocks' SADs to calculate 41 motion vectors (MVs) of a 16X16 block in parallel. The design is implemented with TSMC 0.18 mum CMOS technology. Under a clock frequency of 180 MHz, the architecture allows the real-time processing of 1280 x 720 at 45 fps in a search range [-16, +16].