Bandwidth reduction for video processing in consumer systems
Egbert G. T. Jaspers, Peter H. N. de With · IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics · 2001
The architecture of the present video processing units in consumer systems is usually based on various forms of processor hardware, communicating with an off-chip SDRAM memory. Examples of these systems are currently available MPEG encoders and decoders, and high-end television systems. Due to the fast increase of required computational power of consumer systems, the data communication to and from the off-chip memory has become the bottleneck in the overall system performance (memory wall problem). This paper presents a strategy for mapping pixels into the memory for video applications such as MPEG processing, thereby minimizing the transfer overhead between memory and the processing. A novelty in our approach is that the proposed communication model considers the statistics of the application-dependent data accesses in memory. With this technique, a 26% reduction of the memory bandwidth was obtained in an MPEG decoding system containing a 64-bit wide memory bus. For double-data-rate SDRAM (DDR SDRAM), the proposed mapping strategy reduces the bandwidth in the system by even 50%. This substantial performance improvement can readily be used for extending the quality or the functionality of the system.