A Memory-Based Hardware Accelerator for Real-Time MPEG-4 Audio Coding and Reverberation

In this paper we propose a memory-based hardware accelerator for MPEG-4 audio coding and reverberation to achieve both high quality and reality of audio. The proposed design can realize both the computation-intensive component of 256/2048-point IMDCT and the 1024-point FFT-based reverberation through the same hardware engine by adopting a unified IMDCT/FFT/IFFT algorithm, which greatly reduces the hardware cost. The proposed design can achieve both the real-time 5.1 channel audio decoding at the sampling rate of 44.1 KHz and audio reverberation with the hardware cost of 26,633 gates and 4.6K words of local memory for storing transform coefficients and temporary results. The maximum working frequency achieves 220 MHz when implemented by UMC 0.18um CMOS technology, which can fit the real-time processing requirement of many high quality MPEG-4 audio coding applications.