A single-chip MPEG-2 422P@ML video, audio, and system encoder with a 162 MHz media-processor core and dual motion estimation cores

A single-chip MPEG-2 video, audio and system encoder LSI has been developed. It performs concurrent real-time processing of MPEG-2 422P@ML video encoding. 2- channel Dolby Digital or MPEG-1 audio encoding, and system encoding that generates a multiplexed transport stream (TS) or a program stream (PS). Advanced hybrid architecture, which combines a high performance VLIW media-processor D30V and hard-wired video processing circuits has been adopted to satisfy the demands of both high flexibility and enormous computational capability. A unified control scheme has been newly proposed that hierarchically manages adaptive task priority control over asynchronous video, audio, and system encoding processes in order to achieve real-time concurrent processing using a single D30V. Dual dedicated motion estimation cores consisting of a coarse ME core (CME) for wide range searches and a fine ME core (FME) for precise searches have been integrated to produce high picture quality while using a small amount of hardware. Adopting these features, a single-chip encoder has been fabricated using 0.25-micron 4-layer metal CMOS technology, and integrated into a 14.2 mm x 14.2 mm die with 11 million transistors.