A High-Throughput Hardware Architecture for AV1 Non-Directional Intra Modes

Abstract

The AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) industry consortium and released in 2018, is an open-source and royalty-free video coding format. The goal of AV1 is to deliver substantial compression gains over state-of-the-art codecs such as VP9 and HEVC, while keeping a practical decoding complexity, hardware feasibility and an open and free status. This paper presents a high-throughput hardware architecture for ten non-directional AV1 intra prediction modes: DC, Paeth, Smooth, Smooth Vertical, Smooth Horizontal and Recursive-filtering-based modes 0 to 4. The proposed design supports all 19 block sizes specified by AV1 and, in the worst-case scenario, is able to process every single combination of these blocks according to the 10-way partition tree, with a throughput of UHD 4K videos at up to 30 frames per second. When synthesized to the TSMC 40nm cell library targeting a frequency of 648MHz, the proposed design used 128.5K gates and showed a power dissipation and energy consumption per predicted sample of 65.5mW and 0.176pJ/sample, respectively. No other works were found in the literature describing hardware designs for AV1 intra prediction encoder.