ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the latest and the most powerful video coding standard, the H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC), as design example to illustrate the design issues and methodologies of application-specific multimedia architecture. It focuses on how to design an efficient Very-large-scale integration architecture for temporal prediction of H.264/AVC to meet the requirement of huge computation complexity and memory bandwidth, which are the most critical issues for the hardware design of a video coding system. The chapter provides a brief introduction of design issue of application-specific multimedia architecture. It shows the system-level design of a H.264/AVC video encoder and discusses the temporal prediction architecture and data reuse method of H.264/AVC. The chapter examines a comprehensive discussion about design issues and architecture exploration of the most important function in video coding, the integer motion estimation. It explores the architecture of new coding tools proposed by H.264/AVC, the fractional motion estimation.
