Low-power data transfer and storage exploration for H.263 video decoder system

We describe a power exploration methodology for data-dominated applications using a H.263 video decoding demonstrator application. The starting point for our exploration is a C specification of the video decoder, available in the public domain from Telenor Research. We have transformed the data-transfer scheme in the specification, and have optimized the distributed memory organization. This results in a memory architecture with significantly reduced power consumption. For the worst case mode using predicted (P) frames, memory power consumption is reduced by a factor of 7 when compared to the reference design. For the worst case mode using predicted and bi-directional (PB) frames, memory power consumption is reduced by a factor of 9. To achieve these results, we make use of our formalized high-level memory management methodology, partly supported in our ATOMIUM environment.