Performance-cost analyses software for H.264 Forward/Inverse Integer Transform

In the literature, Data Throughput rate per Unit Area (DTUA) has been used as the sole metric to evaluate the effectiveness of H.264 Forward/Inverse Integer Transform (FIT/IIT) designs. However, other than throughput and circuit area involved in DTUA, interconnection, power and delay are not considered. In this paper, we first summarize the Performance-Cost Metric (PCM) technique, where PCM is defined as the ratio of data throughput over the design cost including power, area, delay, and issues associated with interconnections in sub-micron designs. Compared to DTUA, PCM facilitates more comprehensive comparisons for VLSI designs, including FIT/IIT. The contribution of this paper is the software that helps facilitate the use of the PCM technique. When using this software, users are asked to enter some preliminary parameters of their design. Based on the given parameters and the reference designs managed using the software, it then analyzes and provides the possible boundaries of the users' design in order to have better PCMs compared to the reference designs. In addition, it can also export comparison results among different designs. The software is flexibly designed in order to facilitate the use of not only our PCM technique in FIT/IIT designs, but also different metrics in other architectures.