A High-Throughput Hardware Design for the AV1 Decoder Intraprediction

Abstract

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) (AV1) was released in 2018 as a royalty-free and open-source video codec. AV1 was developed by the AOMedia that is composed of many leading tech companies. AV1 has the goal to process ultrahigh definition (UHD) 8K (7680 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math> </inline-formula> 4320 pixels) and 4K videos (3840 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math> </inline-formula> 2160 pixels) and to achieve high coding efficiency, which leads to increased complexity when compared to other codecs in the market, such as VP9, HEVC, and H.264. This article presents the AV1 intraprediction decoder (AVID), a dedicated high-throughput hardware design for the AV1 decoder intraprediction supporting the AV1 68 prediction modes and 19 block sizes. The proposed architecture can decode UHD 4K videos at 120 frames/s in the worst case, requiring an operation frequency of 279.93 MHz and demanding a total area of 234.45 kgates with a power dissipation of 27.74 mW. The comparison with related works showed that AVID reached the smallest area and very competitive power results. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first article detailing the hardware design of a complete decoder for intraprediction targeting the AV1 codec.