With the ever-increasing demand for real-time video applications, a dedicated and efficient architecture for motion estimation has become a necessity. In this paper, we present an architecture for affine motion estimation which meets the real-time application requirements. The architecture employs a modular memory structure for efficient pipelined parallel implementation of affine motion estimation using the one-dimensional hierarchical search (IDHS) algorithm. Implementation results in terms of the number of clock cycles and PSNR values demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed architecture.