Co-design and Implementation of the H.264/AVC Motion Estimation Algorithm Using Co-simulation

This paper proposes an efficient implementation of the H.264/AVC motion estimation algorithm in hardware and software. Furthermore, a complete co-design trajectory from the HW/SW partitioning to the actual implementation on two different targets is shown. A Leon 3 + FPGA and an ARM + Montium implementation have been successfully realized. The FPGA implementation shows a speed-up of 43.6× whereas the Montium implementation shows a speed-up of 21.5×, both compared to a software-only im-plementation. Power consumption is 42.0 mW for the FPGA and 60.2 mW for the Montium. A co-simulation tool, CosiMate, is used to achieve both on target implementations in just five weeks