Analysis of an SOC Architecture for MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding Framework

Due to the variety of popular video coding standards, many efforts have been put into the design of a single video decoder chip that supports multiple formats. In 2004, ISO/IEC MPEG started a new work item to facilitate multi-format video codec design and to enable more flexible usage of coding tools. The work item has turned into the MPEG reconfigurable video coding (RVC) framework. The key concept of the RVC framework is to allow flexible reconfiguration of coding tools to create different codec solutions on-the-fly. In this paper, flexible SoC architecture is proposed to support the RVC framework. Some analysis has been conducted to show the extra costs required for this platform compared to hard-wired codec architecture. In conclusion, the RVC framework can be mapped to an SoC platform to provide flexibility and scalability for dynamic application environment with reasonable cost in hardware design.