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A High Throughput Processor Chip for Transform and Quantization Coding in H.264/AVC

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Abstract

This paper presents an ASIC processor chip for real-time implementation of the computing of the complete process of forward transform, quantization, inverse transform, dequantization, and reconstruction of a 16 × 16 macroblock in full compliance with the H.264/AVC video coding standard. This processor is capable of processing 4 × 4 blocks without interruption, with a parallelism in the data-path of 16 data/cycle, in a pipeline architecture with the twofold aim of achieving high operation frequency and high throughput. To implement the four 4 × 4 transforms and two 2 × 2 transforms required in the H.264/AVC coding system, two configurable multitransform direct 2-D architectures are used, one for forward and another for inverse. Moreover, a reduction in hardware is achieved by reformulating of quantization and dequantization equations and appropriately adjusting the datapath bus widths. A prototype of this processor chip was fabricated in the HCMOS9 STMicroelectronics 130 nm standard cell technology. The latency for 16 × 16 macroblocks is 26 clock cycles in normal mode and 42 in Intra 16 × 16 mode with a maximum operating frequency of 280 MHz and a throughput of 4,480 Mpixels/s. As a result, our processor chip is able to support the UHDTV 7680 × 4320@60 Hz (3 G sample/s) format requirement.

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Acknowledgment

We wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through TEC2006-12438/TCM received to finance this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dpto. de Electrónica y Computadores, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Cantabria, Avda. de Los Castros s/n, 39005, Santander, Spain

    Miguel A. Manzano, Juan A. Michell & Gustavo A. Ruiz

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  1. Miguel A. Manzano
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  2. Juan A. Michell
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  3. Gustavo A. Ruiz
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Correspondence to Miguel A. Manzano.

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Manzano, M.A., Michell, J.A. & Ruiz, G.A. A High Throughput Processor Chip for Transform and Quantization Coding in H.264/AVC. J Sign Process Syst 70, 59–73 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-012-0660-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-012-0660-z

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