DSP architecture for motion estimation acceleration

A modified DSP architecture, to accelerate motion estimation (ME) algorithms, is presented in this paper. The proposed SIMD and VLIW architecture is a trade-off between ASIC implementation and DSP implementation of ME, which can perform subtract, absolute and add (SAA.) operations on 8 pixels and fetch 8 new pixels from memory at the same time. A flexible align addressing mode is provided to support efficient and continuous SAA operation on video streams. The DSP is estimated to be 20 times faster than an SISD architecture in performing ME algorithms.