Argon Design licenses HEVC/H.265 streams to Imagination Technologies

CAMBRIDGE, England — Argon Design Ltd., a leading supplier of advanced video verification solutions, has licensed Argon Streams to Imagination Technologies Limited, to provide improved verification coverage of Imagination’s PowerVR Series5 D5500 HEVC video decoder intellectual property (“IP”) core.

Argon Streams is a comprehensive set of test bit-streams that are generated directly from the HEVC specification to ensure full coverage and complete verification of all aspects of the standard, including obscure corner cases that many other bit-streams overlook.

As a market leading technology IP company, Imagination needed to ensure that its PowerVR D5500 HEVC decoder was fully compliant with the HEVC video compression standard. As Chris Longstaff, Imagination’s Director of Business Development explained, “We could see that Argon Design’s formal approach to IP verification was what we needed to help maximize our confidence in our HEVC decoder core. The ability to run the compact set of Argon Streams bit-streams as part of our test suite lets us quickly check for compliance following any changes to RTL before running our extensive internal test suite, and also helps us demonstrate our full conformance to the HEVC standard.”

Alan Scott, CEO of Argon Design says, “Imagination has the highest volume shipping video decoder core in the industry, relied upon by many customers. We’re delighted that Imagination has used the Argon Streams to help prove that their design is fully compliant to the H.265 standard and helps them demonstrate that the core is fully capable of decoding all Main & Main10 H.265 standards compliant streams.”

The Argon streams bit-streams are designed to give comprehensive coverage of the core specification for Main and Main10 profiles. The coverage includes every equation in the core specification, every transition in the CABAC engine, every extreme value in the pixel processing pipeline and complete coverage of all video resolutions in Table A-3 up to and including level 5.2.

Argon Streams includes an optional Coverage Tool that generates an interactive coverage report to give a detailed view of:

• coverage statistics for every equation and part of equation
• tooltips to show exactly which streams are used to test each equation
• maximum and minimum values for each parsed and computed variable
• coverage statistics for every CABAC transition
• coverage statistics for every value of every CABAC decoded symbol
• theoretical and observed ranges for data in the pixel processing pipeline

By accurately measuring the test coverage directly against the specification, Argon Streams has been optimized to reduce both the size of each bit-stream, and the quantity of test bit-streams, which in turn dramatically reduces simulation time.

Argon Streams is sold and supported worldwide by ChipStart LLC. For more information contact your local ChipStart representative.