Silicon IP Provider Chips&Media Launches AV1 Video Encoder Hardware IP for 4K/UHD Video Resolutions and Beyond

Seoul, South Korea – June 17th, 2021 – Chips&Media, a worldwide leading hardware IP provider of video codec, computer vision, and image signal processing, today unveiled AV1 supported video encoder hardware IP WAVE627, from the newly released next-generation video codec IP platform, WAVE6.

The WAVE6 series is a newly designed IP series that Chips&Media recently transformed the comprehensive architecture to deliver advanced performance and a high-quality image. The architecture has been upgraded to support higher bandwidth efficiency, minimum area size, reduced power consumption, and low encoding latency. Additionally, the visual quality has been tested with the earlier released series, WAVE5, by PSNR and SSIM metrics, and achieved striking improvements in the new architecture by tuning major encoding factors tool and algorithm that directly impact image quality.

The first runner-up from the WAVE6 series, WAVE627 is a high-performance 4K multi-standard encoder hardware dedicated to AV1, including HEVC/H.265 and AVC/H.264 video standards. This IP core is based on a more defined architecture design and delivers sophisticated encoding quality with a single core to compress 4K60fps@500MHz on the proven architecture of Chips&Media.

The Video Coding Engine (VCE) incorporates an on-the-fly entropy engine for simpler architecture and minimum control. The architecture takes full advantage of VCE for the entire encoding process from block-level processing to stream generation. Thus, it is easy to implement software functions based on the simple architecture design and integrate them into a small-sized System-on-Chip (SoC). Like other IPs by Chips&Media, a specialized hardware block called CFrame^TM is integrated into the video IP. With compression of reference frames, this IP core can significantly reduce bus transactions while accessing extensive frame data effectively in the external memory.

The new encoder IP, WAVE627, is perfectly suitable for edge servers (e.g., video transcoding, video analytics, cloud data center) and consumer applications in the smartphone, tablet, action camera, automotive, surveillance cameras, AR/VR, and much more.

Supported Standards

Encoder Features	AV1	HEVC/H.265	AVC/H.264
Profile	Main Profile Level@5.1	Main/Main10 Profile Level@5.2	Baseline/Main/High and High 10 Profile Level@5.2
Target Performance	4K60fps@500MHz Max resolution 8192x8192 Min resolution 256x128	4K60fps@500MHz Max resolution 8192x8192 Min resolution 256x128	4K60fps@500MHz Max resolution 8192x8192 Min resolution 256x128

Value-added

Features

Frame Buffer Compression (FBC) Low Delay Encoding Configurable IP Low Power Consumption Multi-instances Bit-depth and Chroma Format Conversion 8-bit to 10-bit Conversion and Vice versa of the source picture

About Chips&Media

Chips&Media provides ultra-low-power, high-performance multi-codec video IPs to semiconductor companies internationally specializes in video codec, deep learning-based computer vision, and image processing video IP cores for the surveillance, automotive, and broader consumer electronic markets. The company was founded in 2003 and headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, with offices worldwide.

Visit www.chipsnmedia.com for more information.