High-Level Synthesis Design Flow for HEVC Intra Encoder on SoC-FPGA

This paper presents a High-Level Synthesis (HLS) flow for mapping a software HEVC encoder into Altera CycloneV SoC-FPGA. The starting point is a C implementation of an open-source Kvazaar HEVC intra encoder, which is minimally refined for SystemC design space exploration and automatic Catapult-C RTL generation. The final implementation involves Kvazaar encoder executed in Linux on dual-core ARM, and HW accelerated intra prediction on FPGA. Changing the SW/HW partitioning or modifying the implementation takes hours instead of weeks with Catapult-C HLS. In addition, the design is portable to other platforms without major manual re-writing. We obtained 9 fps full-HD intra prediction speed with a single accelerator on Altera Cyclone V SX on Terasic VEEK-MT-C5SoC board including video capture and HEVC video streaming via Ethernet. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported HLS assisted implementation of HEVC encoder on SoC-FPGA.