The UHT-H264E-FME core from Alma Technologies is a scalable, ultra-high throughput, hardware H.264 encoder, designed to enable 4K and 8K Ultra HD resolutions in
power- and cost-effective FPGA or ASIC implementations. Powered by a highly-featured Full Motion Estimation engine, this encoder is the most
advanced one of our UHT H.264 IP cores and offers best-in-class compression for
applications needing advanced H.264 efficiency for high-quality, low-bitrate video encoding. Encapsulating the longstanding Alma Technologies
expertise with H.264, this encoder offers perceptually optimized image quality and includes valuable technology, such as its high-quality,
low-latency, Intra-Refresh based encoding option.
The UHT-H264E-FME can be configured to support Baseline, Main and High profiles, 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 chroma sampling, and up to 12-bit per component color
depth. It can be also used for high frame rate SD to Full HD interlaced or progressive video encoding. The core is very easy-to-use and integrate
in a system. It is an autonomous, CPU/GPU-less, complete H/W implementation, accepting video input in standard raster scanned interleaved order
and producing ready-to-use H.264 NAL byte-stream output.
The UHT-H264E-FME is based on a scalable architecture that uses a configurable number of internal, parallel processing, engines. This is done in a way
which is totally transparent to the system utilizing the IP, abstracting all the parallelization complexity from the rest SoC design and operation.
In addition to the configurable number of internal engines that matches the throughput requirements to the available silicon speed, the encoder
can be further fine-tuned before synthesis to save silicon area by removing features that are not needed in a certain implementation.
The UHT-H264E-FME core implements a simple and flexible, requests based, external memory interface with independent read and write data paths.
The external memory I/F is also designed to be tolerant to memory delays and latencies, which may be present in a shared memory system architecture.
Being carefully designed and rigorously verified the UHT-H264E-FME is a reliable and easy-to-use and integrate IP.
IP Deliverables
Clear-text RTL sources for ASIC designs, or pre-synthesized and verified Netlist for FPGA and SoC devices
Release Notes, Design Specification and Integration Manual documents
Bit Accurate Model (BAM) and test vector generation binaries, including sample scripts
Pre-compiled RTL simulation model and gate-level simulation netlist for the FPGA Netlist license
Self-checking testbench environment sources, including sample BAM generated test cases
Simulation and sample Synthesis (for ASICs) or Place & Route (for FPGAs) scripts
Specifications »
Symbol
Features
Standard Compliant and Standalone Operation
Full compliance to the ITU-T H.264 specification
Constrained Baseline, Main, High 10, High 10 intra, High 4:2:2, High 4:2:2 intra, High 4:4:4 (12 bit 4:2:2 or 4:2:0), and High 4:4:4 intra (12 bit 4:2:2 or 4:2:0) profiles encoding
4:2:0 and 4:2:2 YCbCr digital video input
8-, 10- and 12-bit per component color depth encoding
ITU-T H.264 Annex B compliant NAL byte-stream output
Profile Level up to 5.2
No host CPU assisted, autonomous operation
Advanced H.264 Implementation
True H.264 compression efficiency and perceptually optimized Image Quality
Ultra-High throughput using scalable and transparent parallel processing
Advanced Motion Estimation
Full search
Variable block size
Full, half and quarter pixel
Up to 4 motion vectors per macroblock
Advanced Intra prediction
All 4 Intra 16x16 prediction modes
All 4 Intra Chroma prediction modes
All 9 Intra 4x4 prediction modes
Intra in P (all prediction modes are always examined)
CABAC or CAVLC entropy coding
CQP - VBR encoding mode
CBR encoding mode
One frame algorithmic encoding latency
Intra-Refresh encoding mode available for zero additional latency contribution to the end-to-end system latency
On-the-fly bitrate changes supported
Multiple slices per frame encoding
Smooth System Integration
Full abstraction of the internal implementation details and the H.264 complexity from the top level I/O and its operation
Simple, microcontroller like, programming interface
High-speed, flow controllable, streaming I/O data interfaces
Simple and FIFO like
Avalon-ST compliant (ready latency 0)
AXI4-Stream compliant
Low requirements in external memory bandwidth
Flexible external memory interface
Independent of external memory type
Tolerant to latencies
Allows for shared memory access
Can optionally operate on independent clock domain
Trouble-Free Technology Map and Implementation
Fully portable, self-contained RTL source code
Strictly positive edge triggered design
D-type only Flip-Flops
Safe CDC transfers when using more than one clock domain
No special timing constraints required
No false or multi-cycle paths within the same clock domain
No CDC transfers that need to be constrained (all CDC paths can be excluded)
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