High-Throughput Multifilter Interpolation Architecture for AV1 Motion Compensation

This brief presents a high-throughput hardware design for the motion compensation (MC) sub-sample interpolator of the novel AOMedia video 1 (AV1). A multifilter interpolation architecture (MFIA) is presented targeting AV1 decoders and supporting all 90 filters defined by the AV1 MC. The MFIA uses shift-adds instead of multipliers and common subexpression sharing to reduce the hardware costs, to increase the throughput, and to reduce the power dissipation. Two different versions of MC interpolators using MFIA are also presented in this brief. The MFIA and the two versions of MC interpolators were synthesized for 40-nm TSMC standard-cells. The results showed that the MC interpolators are able to process up to 4320 p videos at 30 frames/s, with a maximum power dissipation of 81.31 mW. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work presenting a hardware design for the MC of AV1.