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A Highly Parallel Joint VLSI Architecture for Transforms in H.264/AVC

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Abstract

In H.264/AVC, the concept of adapting the transform size to the block size of motion-compensated prediction residue has proven to be an important coding tool. This paper presents highly parallel joint circuit architecture for 8 × 8 and 4 × 4 adaptive block-size transforms in H.264/AVC. By decomposing the 8 × 8 transform to basic 4 × 4 transforms, a unified architecture is designed for both 8 × 8 and 4 × 4 transform and the transform data-path can be efficiently reused for six kinds of transforms. i.e., 8 × 8 forward, 8 × 8 inverse, 4 × 4 forward, 4 × 4 inverse, forward-Hadamard, inverse-Hadamard transforms. Linear shift mapping is applied on the memory buffer to support parallel access both in row and column directions which eliminates the need for a transpose circuit. For reusable and configurable transform data-path, a multiple-stage pipeline is designed to reduce the critical path length and increase throughput. The design is implemented under UMC 0.18 um technology at 200 MHz with 13.651 K logic gates, which can support 1,920 × 1,088 30 fps H.264/AVC HDTV decoder.

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Correspondence to Yu Li.

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Li, Y., He, Y. & Mei, S. A Highly Parallel Joint VLSI Architecture for Transforms in H.264/AVC. J Sign Process Syst Sign Image 50, 19–32 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-007-0111-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-007-0111-4

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