Allegro DVT Launches Industry’s First Real-Time AV1 Video Encoder Hardware IP for 4K/UHD Video Encoding

Grenoble, France, April 23, 2019 – Allegro DVT, a leading provider of video semiconductor IP solutions, today announced the availability of its AL-E210 multi-format video encoder hardware IP, which adds support for the new AV1 video format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia).

AOMedia was founded in 2015 by industry leaders including Google, Netflix, Intel, and Microsoft to provide an open-source, royalty-free alternative to H.265/HEVC and other standards while improving compression and delivering the same video quality at lower bitrates. Allegro DVT joined AOMedia early on and is an active member of the AV1 video format development. 

AL-E210 is the first video encoder IP to achieve real-time and file-based encoding in AV1 format with resolutions up to 4K/UHD. Built on a true multi-format architecture, it provides support for H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9 and JPEG by sharing resources between five codecs to achieve the best balance between silicon area, system memory bandwidth and power consumption.

Nouar Hamze, CEO of Allegro DVT, commented: “Hardware acceleration of AV1 encoding is critical to ensure real-time performance and encoding density. Our new AL-E210 is the ideal solution to help our customers bring a world-class encoding chip to market, thereby ensuring rapid industry adoption of the AV1 Codec format.”

The AL-E210 is also built on the proven Allegro DVT multi-core architecture, which has the flexibility to achieve different performance levels to meet the requirements of the target application. This innovative architecture provides options for higher picture resolutions such as 8K and higher frame rates (up to 120fps). 

The AL-E210 inherits all the smart encoding features of previous Allegro DVT encoder products, such as pre-processing and noise reduction filters, automatic detection of source image region of interest (ROI), and very low encoding latency. In addition, the AL-E210 embeds various caching and compression mechanisms to reduce memory bandwidth requirements, which has become a critical system-level issue as video resolutions and frame rates increase.

About  Allegro DVT

Allegro DVT is a leading provider of H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AVS2, VP9 and AV1 solutions, including industry standard conformance test suites, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC and VP9 encoder, codec and decoder hardware (RTL) IP. Allegro DVT's products have been selected by more than 100 major IC providers, OEMs and broadcasters.