A High-Throughout Design of CAVLC Decoder for H.264/AVC

Abstract

In this paper, a novel high-throughput method is proposed to improve the decoding efficiency of the context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) procedure of H.264/AVC. Due to the data dependency among symbols in the entropy decoding flow, the CAVLC decoder requires large computation period, which dominates the overall decoder system performance. To expedite its decoding speed, the critical path in the CAVLC decoder is first analyzed. This paper presents a double level design for H.264/AVC CAVLC decoding. In the proposed design, we exploit a predict strategy to achieve double level decoding. Experimental results show that the operation period of the proposed architecture can be reduced about 28.3% compare with the tradition CAVLC architecture. The maximum frequency can be larger than 120 MHz, which can support the real time requirement.