Frame Buffer Access Reduction for MPEG Video Decoder

Frame buffer power consumption and bandwidth requirement are two critical design issues in MPEG video decoders due to the overwhelming amount of frame data accesses. This paper proposes a reusable macroblock detector (RMD) which exploits the characteristic of a stationary macroblock (MB) to identify the reusable MBs in the frame buffer and avoid unnecessary data transfers. The RMD on average reduces about one quarter of the frame buffer accesses for 18 video sequences.