This paper is dedicated to a hardware architecture development for JPEG2000 entropy decoding unit (EDU) which consist of two parts: context modeling unit (CMU) and arithmetic decoding unit (ADU). To achieve a high throughput we propose an efficient pixel skipping scheme to save clock cycles for non-context position in CMU and realize the ADU logic by combinational circuit to keep the result of ADU within the same clock of context which can reduce the latency to zero clock cycle between CMU and ADU. We show that the proposed EDU architecture attains a throughput of 68.66–232.14 Mbps for a single decoding core depending on compression ratios, and consumes 95.79 mW based on SMIC 0.13 um technology. In comparison with the state-of-the-art decoders the proposed EDU architecture provides consistent reconstruction performance with software decoder and comparable throughput, memory and power consumption.