FPGA based synchronous multi-port SRAM architecture for motion estimation

Abstract

Very often in signal and video processing applications, there is a strong demand for accessing the same memory location through multiple read ports. For video processing applications like Motion Estimation (ME), the same pixel, as part of the search window, is used in many calculations of SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences). In a design for such applications, there is a trade-off between number of effective gates used and the maximum operating frequency. Particularly, in FPGAs, the existing block RAMs do not support multiple port access and the replication of DRAM (Distributed RAM) leads to significant increase in the number of used CLBs (Configurable Logic Blocks). The present paper analyses different approaches that were previously used to solve this problem (same location reading)and proposes an effective solution by using an efficient combinational logic to synchronously and simultaneously read the video pixel memory data through multiple read-ports.