Reconfigurable and programmable minimum distance search engine for portable video compression systems

A Reconfigurable and Programmable Minimum Distance Search Engine (RP-MDSE) is presented as a hardware accelerator for portable video compression systems. Our architectural-level estimation shows that a reconfigurable structure with memory-merged logic and low-power processing elements can achieve high throughput as well as dramatic power savings. Based on the measurement results of our prototype chip fabricated with a 0.6 /spl mu/m single-poly triple-metal CMOS technology, the estimated one dissipates 32/spl sim/66% less power than the other chips for H.26x motion estimation. Moreover, it operates as fast as the recent vector quantization chip, while having a small code-book of 16 dimensional 8 code-vectors.