Amer, IBadawy, WJullien, GMattavelli, MTurney, R2009-01-282009-01-282009-01-28200710.1142/S021812660700399Xhttps://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/34447WOS:00025609570001112686Current multimedia design processes suffer from the excessively large time spent on testing new IP-blocks with references based on large video encoders specifications (usually several thousands lines of code). The appropriate testing of a single IP-block may require the conversion of the overall encoder from software to hardware, which is difficult to complete in the short time required by the competition-driven reduced time-to-market demanded for the adoption of a new video coding standard. This paper presents a new design flow to accelerate the conformance testing of an IP-block using the H.264/AVC software reference model. An example block of the simplified 8 × 8 transformation and quantization, which is adopted in FRExt, is provided as a case study demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach.text::journal::journal article::research article