HIERARCHICAL TILING OF DATA FOR EFFICIENT DATA ACCESS IN HIGH PERFORMANCE VIDEO APPLICATIONS

In a video application, a method and system provide different sizes of data-fetch where the data transfer rate between a decoder and an external memory (e.g., DDR memory) is extremely high, as for example in HDTV systems. The invention in one form divides a reference frame into different tiles where each tile is hierarchically divided into smaller tiles to a level where the minimum tile size is the same as the fixed burst size of the DDR memory. The method also provides for arranging the biggest tiles into different banks and pages so that even if the block to be fetched falls across tile boundaries, the latency penalty in the tile transition will be minimized. The invention provides advantages also for progressive and interlaced data fetch.