Application Specific Programmable IP Core for Motion Estimation: Technology Comparison Targeting Efficient Embedded Co-Processing Units

The implementation of a recently proposed IP core of an efficient motion estimation co-processor is considered. Some significant functional improvements to the base architecture are proposed, as well as the presentation of a detailed description of the interfacing between the co-processor and the main processing unit of the video encoding system. Then, a performance analysis of two distinct implementations of this IP core is presented, considering two different target technologies: a high performance FPGA device, from the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro family, and an ASIC based implementation, using a 0.18 mum CMOS StdCell library. Experimental results have shown that the two alternative implementations have quite similar performance levels and allow the estimation of motion vectors in real-time.