Scalable MPEG-4 Encoder on FPGA Multiprocessor SOC

High computational requirements combined with rapidly evolving video coding algorithms and standards are a great challenge for contemporary encoder implementations. Rapid specification changes prefer full programmability and configurability both for software and hardware. This paper presents a novel scalable MPEG-4 video encoder on an FPGA-based multiprocessor systemon-chip (MPSOC). The MPSOC architecture is truly scalable and is based on a vendor-independent intellectual property (IP) block interconnection network. The scalability in video encoding is achieved by spatial parallelization where images are divided to horizontal slices. A case design is presented with up to four synthesized processors on an Altera Stratix 1S40 device. A truly portable ANSI-C implementation that supports an arbitrary number of processors gives 11 QCIF frames/s at 50MHz without processor specific optimizations. The parallelization efficiency is 97% for two processors and 93%with three. The FPGA utilization is 70%, requiring 28 797 logic elements. The implementation effort is significantly lower compared to traditional multiprocessor implementations.