A Vector Instruction-based RISC Architecture for a Photovoltaic System Monitoring Camera

Photovoltaic systems have emerged to be one of the cleanest energy systems. Therefore, many large scale solar parks and PV farms have been built to prepare for the post fossil fuel ages. However, due to their large scale, to efficiently manage and operate PV systems, they need to be visually monitored within the range of infrared ray through the Internet. To satisfy this need, the efficient implementation of a high performance video compression standard is required. This paper therefore presents an implementation of H.264 motion estimation, which is one of the most data-intensive and complicated functions in H.264. To achieve this, this work implements vector instructions in hardware and incorporates them in a generic RISC processor architecture, thus increasing the processing speed while minimizing hardware and software design efforts. Extensive simulation results show that this proposed implementation can process motion estimations up to 13 times faster.