Our present ability to work with video has been confined to a wired environment, requiring both the video encoder and decoder to be physically connected to a power supply and a wired communication link. This paper describes an integrated approach to the design of a portable video-on-demand system capable of delivering high-quality image and video data in a wireless communication environment. The discussion will focus on both the algorithm and circuit design techniques developed for implementing a low-power video compression/decompression system at power levels that are two orders of magnitude below existing solutions. This low-power video compression system not only provides a compression efficiency similar to industry standards, but also maintains a high degree of error tolerance to guard against transmission errors often encountered in wireless communication. The required power reduction can best be attained through reformulating compression algorithms for energy conservation. We developed an intra-frame compression algorithm that requires minimal computation energy in its hardware implementations.>

The paper describes a VLSI architecture designed to reconstruct a subband-encoded video stream. This architecture differs from previous designs in its low power operation. The chip operates at a maximum 20 MHz with a 1.5 V supply and can process up to 10 M color (YUV) pixels/sec while dissipating only 16 mW. The low power consumption is achieved through efficient algorithm-to-hardware mapping, a low-complexity subband filter, minimal memory accesses, a reduced supply voltage, and elimination of external memory support. A single chip will support color images up to 352 pixels wide, while multiple chip configurations can achieve any desired display resolution.>