AV1 Arithmetic Encoder Design on Open-Source EDA

Abstract

With the increasing demand for video transmission through the Internet, video coding has become a key technology to allow this market's growth at a reduced cost. Moreover, with the inception of higher video resolutions (e.g., 4K, 8K) and their impact on video size, new video coding standards must tackle this issue to reduce video traffic demand on the global internet infrastructure. The AV1, a recently released royalties-free video coding format created by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), reaches great compression rates but cannot accomplish real-time execution on software-only implementations due to its high complexity. This paper presents and analyzes AE-AV1, a high-performance 4-stage pipelined architecture to accelerate the AV1 arithmetic encoding process (part of the entropy encoder block) and make it capable of real-time execution. For the analysis, this work aims to rely on fully open-source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and Package Design Kits (PDKs).