High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video coding standard in video compression. With HEVC, it is possible to compress the video with half the bitrate compared to the previous video coding standard, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), with the same video quality. Now even, the complexity of the encoder is significantly larger.
As designs become more and more complex, traditional hardware (HW) description languages (HDLs), such as Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL) or Verilog, can not be used to present the designs without increasing effort. The solution for this is a higher abstraction language for describing HW. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a way of using a programming language like C or C++ to describe the HW and automatically generating the HDL from it. This makes the code easier to understand and decreases the time used for implementing the design.
This Thesis uses Catapult-C to create an HLS-based implementation of HEVC intra prediction for a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The HEVC encoder used in this Thesis is open source Kvazaar which has been developed at Tampere University of Technology. The objective is to implement an intra prediction accelerator faster than implementing it with register-transfer level (RTL) using VHDL or Verilog and still get comparable area and performance.
This Thesis presents six development versions of the intra prediction accelerator. The complexity of the accelerator grows gradually, as more features were added to it. The final version is able to perform the intra prediction, mode cost computation and mode decision for Full HD video at 24.5 fps using 11 662 adaptive logic modules (ALMs) on an Altera Cyclone V FPGA.
This Thesis presents the benefits of Catapult-C and HLS. The implementation results were comparable to hand coded RTL but achieved with a fraction of the estimated time for a VHDL implementation. As a rough estimate, if something takes a month to implement in VHDL, it takes a week with HLS. The biggest gain with HLS is the fast process of changes. Only the C implementation needs to change. The testbench and the RTL-code are generated automatically
