A 14 GOPS programmable motion estimator for H.26x video coding

This programmable ASIC chip runs multiple motion-estimation algorithms in a distributed programmable architecture, wherein the motion estimator is mapped to three parts: the algorithm control, the data control, and the multimode search engine. The multimode search engine and part of the control are implemented on this chip. Other high-level algorithm and data control are mapped to a host for maximum flexibility. This allows the chip to be used as a coprocessor or as an embedded engine for implementing multiple video standards in programmable form. The algorithm is modeled as a search tree. This search-tree model covers conventional full-search, multi-step search, telescopic search, stochastic search, dynamic search, and our new multi-survivor search algorithms.