VLSI Architectures for the Steerable-Discrete-Cosine-Transform (SDCT)

Since frame resolution of modern video streams is rapidly growing, the need for more complex and efficient video compression methods arises. H.265/HEVC represents the state of the art in video coding standard. Its architecture is however not completely standardized, as many parts are only described at software level to allow the designer to implement new compression techniques. This paper presents an innovative hardware architecture for the Steerable Discrete Cosine Transform (SDCT), which has been recently embedded into the HEVC standard, providing better compression ratios. Such technique exploits directional DCT using basis having different orientation angles, leading to a sparser representation which translates to an improved coding efficiency. The final design is able to work at a frequency of 188 MHZ, reaching a throughput of 3.00 GSample/s. In particular, this architecture supports 8k UltraHigh Definition (UHD) (7680 × 4320) with a frame rate of 60 Hz, which is one of the best resolutions supported by HEVC.