A Single-Chip Video/Audio Codec for Low Bit Rate Application

Abstract

In this paper, we present a design of video and audio single chip encoder/decoder for portable multimedia application. The single-chip called as video audio signal processor (VASP) consists of a video signal processing block and an audio signal processing block. This chip has mixed hardware/software architecture to combine performance and flexibility. We designed the chip by partitioning between video and audio block. The video signal processing block was designed to implement hardwired solution of pixel input/output, full pixel motion estimation, half pixel motion estimation, discrete cosine transform, quantization, run length coding, host interface, and 16 bits RISC type internal controller. The audio signal processing block is implemented with software solution using a 16 bits fixed point DSP. This chip contains 142,300 gates, 22 kbits FIFO, 107 kbits SRAM, and 556 kbits ROM, and the chip size is 9.02 mm ×9.06 mm which is fabricated using 0.5 micron 3-layer metal CMOS technology.