Design and analysis of low power image filters toward defect-resilient embedded memories for multimedia SoCs

In the foreseeable future, System-on-Chip design will suffer from the problem of low yield especially in embedded memories. This can be a critical problem in a multimedia application like H.264 since it needs a huge amount of embedded memory. Existing approaches to solve this problem are not feasible given the higher memory defect density rates in technologies below 90 nm. In this paper, we present a new defect-resilience technique which employs the directional image filter in order to recover data from corrupted embedded memory. According to the analysis based on simulation the proposed filter can greatly improve the visual quality of the defected H.264 video streams with errors in data memory reaching up to 1.0% memory BER (Bit Error Rate) with lower power consumption relative to conventional median filter. Therefore, the proposed method can be a good solution to overcome the problem of low yield in multimedia SoC memory without suffering from additional redundant memory overhead. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.