Scalable UHD H.264 Encoder - Ultra-High Throughput, Light Motion Estimation engine

Overview

The UHT-H264E-LME core from Alma Technologies is a scalable ultra-high throughput H.264 encoder equipped with a very compact Light Motion Estimation engine. Designed to enable 4K UHD resolutions in power- and cost-effective FPGA and ASIC implementations, this core fits best area critical applications that need a medium level of compression, or work with video content that has low motion complexity. Encapsulating the longstanding Alma Technologies expertise with H.264, the encoder offers perceptually optimized image quality and includes valuable technology, such as its high-quality low-latency Intra-Refresh encoding option.

The UHT-H264E-LME can be configured to support Baseline, Main and High profiles, 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 chroma sampling, and up to 12-bit per component color depth. It can be also used for high frame rate SD to Full HD interlaced or progressive video encoding. The core is very easy-to-use and integrate in a system. It is an autonomous, CPU/GPU-less, complete H/W implementation, accepting video input in standard raster scanned interleaved order and producing ready-to-use H.264 NAL byte-stream output.

The UHT-H264E-LME is based on a scalable architecture that uses a configurable number of internal, parallel processing, engines. This is done in a way which is totally transparent to the system utilizing the IP, abstracting all the parallelization complexity from the rest SoC design and operation. In addition to the configurable number of internal engines that matches the throughput requirements to the available silicon speed, the encoder can be further fine-tuned before synthesis to save silicon area by removing features that are not needed in a certain implementation.

The UHT-H264E-LME core implements a simple and flexible, requests based, external memory interface with independent read and write data paths. The external memory I/F is also designed to be tolerant to memory delays and latencies, which may be present in a shared memory system architecture.

Being carefully designed and rigorously verified the UHT-H264E-LME is a reliable and easy-to-use and integrate IP.

Key Features

Standard Compliant and Standalone Operation

Full compliance to the ITU-T H.264 specification
Constrained Baseline, Main, High 10, High 10 intra, High 4:2:2, High 4:2:2 intra, High 4:4:4 (12 bit 4:2:2 or 4:2:0), and High 4:4:4 intra (12 bit 4:2:2 or 4:2:0) profiles encoding
4:2:0 and 4:2:2 YCbCr digital video input
8-, 10- and 12-bit per component color depth encoding
ITU-T H.264 Annex B compliant NAL byte-stream output
Profile Level up to 5.2
No host CPU assisted, autonomous operation

Advanced H.264 Implementation

Perceptually optimized Image Quality
Ultra-High throughput using scalable and transparent parallel processing
Very compact silicon footprint Light Motion Estimation engine
Advanced Intra prediction

All 4 Intra 16x16 prediction modes
All 4 Intra Chroma prediction modes
All 9 Intra 4x4 prediction modes
Intra in P (all prediction modes are always examined)

CABAC or CAVLC entropy coding
CQP - VBR encoding mode
CBR encoding mode
One frame algorithmic encoding latency

Intra Refresh CBR encoding mode available for zero additional latency contribution to the end-to-end latency

On-the-fly bitrate changes supported
Multiple slices per frame encoding

Smooth System Integration

Full abstraction of the internal implementation details and the H.264 complexity from the top level I/O and its operation
Simple, microcontroller like, programming interface
High-speed, flow controllable, streaming I/O data interfaces

Simple and FIFO like
Avalon-ST compliant (ready latency 0)
AXI4-Stream compliant

Low requirements in external memory bandwidth
Flexible external memory interface

Independent of external memory type
Tolerant to latencies
Allows for shared memory access
Can optionally operate on independent clock domain

Trouble-Free Technology Map and Implementation

Fully portable, self-contained RTL source code
Strictly positive edge triggered design
D-type only Flip-Flops
Safe CDC transfers when using more than one clock domain
No special timing constraints required

No false or multi-cycle paths within the same clock domain
No CDC transfers that need to be constrained (all CDC paths can be excluded)

Block Diagram

Deliverables

Clear text self-contained VHDL RTL source for ASIC designs, or pre-synthesized & verified Netlist for Altera, Lattice, Microsemi and Xilinx FPGA and SoC devices
Release Notes, Design Specification and Integration Manual documents
Bit Accurate Model (BAM) and test vector generation binaries, including sample scripts
Self checking testbench environment, including sample BAM generated test cases
Simulation and sample Synthesis (for ASICs) or Place & Route (for FPGAs) scripts

Technical Specifications

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