H264 Video Compression IP

The H.264 video encoder IP cores for FPGA and ASIC designs from Alma Technologies stand out for the compression efficiency and the perceptually optimized image quality they offer. A very rich and well balanced feature-set is offered, along with six base configurations and more than five key options to fine-tune each. Our portfolio includes Baseline, Main and High profiles encoders, supporting 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 chroma sampling with up to 12-bit per component color depth.

The ITU-T H.264 recommendation, also known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC), is an in-force video compression standard that was developed in response to the growing need for higher compression of moving pictures. It has been leading video applications to a new era for over 15 years. Alma Technologies invested a great R&D effort to develop expertise and produce this broad range of H.264 IP cores that perform exceptionally well in a very broad range of applications and requirements.

Ease-of-Use

These H.264 cores are remarkably easy to operate, ready to encode video right out of the box. They have very simple and comprehensive video data and programming interfaces. They accept uncompressed video data in planar, interleaved, or macroblock scan format and output standalone, standard compliant, Annex B NAL byte-stream.

The H.264 cores from Alma Technologies are designed for easy integration in FPGA and ASIC designs. The input and output data interfaces support streaming and allow the external logic to control the data flow. The external memory interface is simple and flexible, with independent requests, read and write data paths. It is also designed to be tolerant to memory delays and latencies, which may be present in a shared memory system architecture.

Top Image Quality

High Performance & Low Power

Our H.264 encoders are designed to achieve high throughput with low clock frequencies. The cores can fit and process Full HD video in low-cost FPGA device families. For example, Full HD 1080p30 video can be encoded in real time using Intel Cyclone III/IV/V or Xilinx Artix-7 devices. In modern ASIC implementations the cores support 4K UHD with remarkable leakage and dynamic power figures.