An ASIC approach to a video coding processor

Picture coding technologies have begun to be applied to the many fields, such as teleconference, videophone, remote surveillance, satellite news gathering, video on LAN, video workstation, and so on. As a result of recent progress in the semiconductor technology, ASICs and high performance DSPs which have enough capability for picture coding have become available. Several kinds of ASIC chip-sets for teleconference and videophone, which are based on CCITT H.261, have been developed recently. Due to the increase of a variety of picture coding applications, a video codec which has both flexibility and high coding performance is required. In the paper, the authors present a new approach to a Video Coding Processor (VCP) which satisfies such a requirement. An ASIC-oriented VCP architecture based on the present semiconductor technology is presented. Implementation results of the VCP are also described