With the widespread popularity of portable devices, such as cellular phones andpersonal digital assistants (PDAs), in these days, people rely on the mobile technologymore and more. To satisfy the low power,low cost, and high performance requirements for consumer electronics, thevideo encoders implemented by the VLSI architectures are much more suitable than the firmware or the software solutions. However, to integrate these ICs into a system is not easy, and these frameworks usually support dedicated frame size, frame rate and output bitrate, which will limit the utilities of the products. In order to overcome these drawbacks, a register-based platform independent MPEG-4 co-processor (RPIMC) is proposed in this paper, and it can transfer and receive the image data in all kinds of bus matrices with the suitable wrappers for being easily integrated into other platforms. RPIMC, which can be programmable to manipulate up to HD resolution and 30 frames per second, with 204K gates and 6,462 bytes of RAM is implemented, and it can adjust the data types of the input and the output streams by modifying the relative registers.
