Design and implementation of a bitstream parsing coprocessor for MPEG-4 video system-on-chip solution

In this paper, the hardware-oriented bitstream structure analysis and an efficient and flexible bitstream parsing processor are presented. The analysis of MPEG-4 video bitstream structure based on RISC model explores requirement and design constraint for bitstream-level processing. It shows that conventional RISC is not efficient enough for bitstream parsing. An efficient instruction set optimized for bitstream processing is designed and the hardware architecture can be reconfigured for various applications. Compared with 160 MOPS required by a RISC, the proposed architecture needs only about 27 MOPS to parse an MPEG-4 video bitstream at high bit-rate as about 40 Mbit/s, which is about 6 times speedup. The impact of the proposed architecture on video applications is to enhance and extend the processing for bit domain translation and related real time applications.