A Low Dynamic Power 90-nm CMOS Motion Estimation Processor Implementing Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling Scheme and Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm Called Adaptively Assigned Breaking-off Condition Search

A 90-nm CMOS motion estimation (ME) processor was developed by employing dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) to greatly reduce the dynamic power. To make full use of the advantages of DVFS, a fast ME algorithm and a small on-chip DC/DC converter were also developed. The fast ME algorithm can adaptively predict the optimum supply voltage ($V_D$) and the optimum clock frequency ($f_c$) before each block matching process starts. Power dissipation of the ME processor, which contained an absolute difference accumulator as well as the on-chip DC/DC converter and DVFS controller, was reduced to $31.5{\mu}W$, which was only 2.8% that of a conventional ME processor.