A MPEG-4 video codec chip with low power scheme for mobile application

In this paper, we present a design of MPEG-4 video codec chip to reduce the power consumption using frame level clock gating, macro block level and motion estimation skip scheme. It performs 30 frames/s of codec (encoding and decoding) mode with quarter-common intermediate format (QCIF) at 27 MHz. Power consumption is 290 mW at 27 MHz operation, which is achieving 35% power saving compared to a conventional CMOS. Motion Estimation skip method is employed to reduce 32% computation load. This chip performs MPEG-4 Simple Profile Level 2 (Simple@L2) and H.263 base mode. Its contains 388,885 gates, 662 k bits memory, and the chip size was 9.7 mm x 9.7 mm which was fabricated using 0.35 micron 3-layers metal CMOS technology.