Variation-Tolerant Motion Estimation Architecture

In this paper, we study the trade-off between energy-efficiency and variation-tolerance of an error-resilient motion estimation architecture. Error-resiliency is incorporated via algorithmic noise-tolerance (ANT) where an input subsampled replica (ISR) of the main sum-of-absolute-difference(MSAD) block is employed for detecting and correcting errors in the MSAD block. This architecture is referred to as ISR-ANT. In the presence of process variations, the average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of ISR-ANT architecture increases by up to 1.8dB over that of the conventional architecture in 130nm IBM process technology. Furthermore, the PSNR variation is also reduced by 7× over that of the conventional architecture at the slow corner while achieving a power reduction of 33%.