Power Dissipation of the Network-on-Chip in Multi-Processor System-on-Chip Dedicated for Video Coding Applications

In the near future, small electronic hand-held devices will be equipped with digital cameras capable of acquiring high resolution images (HDTV) at real-time rates, resulting in video streams of dozens of megabytes per second. The real-time video decoding and especially encoding of such streams with AVC/ H.264 or SVC standards require a huge amount of computing power that, in the case of a hand-held device, has to be delivered under the constraint of low power dissipation. In this paper we present a Multi-Processor System-on-Chip dedicated for high performance, low-power video coding applications using Network-on-Chip (NoC) as communication infrastructure. Extensive experiments have established the power dissipation models of individual NoC components, i.e. network interfaces, routers and wires. Based on these models and the NoC topology, we build the power model of the complete NoC. For three different implementation scenarios of the AVC/H.264 simple profile encoder we derive the power dissipation of the NoC for image resolutions up to HDTV at rate of 30 frames per second. The results obtained show that for the same application mapping scenario (worst case), moving from CIF to HDTV resolution will result in a 35% increase of the total power dissipation. Finally, for HDTV resolution, the difference in power dissipation between the worst (21 mW) and the best case application mapping scenario is 26%.