High-Performance CABAC Engine for H.264/AVC High Definition Real-Time Decoding

This paper presents an efficient VLSI architecture for H.264/AVC CABAC decoding. We introduce several new techniques to extremely exploit, to the largest extent possible, the parallelism of the decoding process, including line-bit-rate decoding, multiple bin arithmetic decoding and efficient probability propagation scheme. The CABAC engine can ensure the real-time decoding for H.264/AVC main profile HD level 4.0. Synthesis results show that the multi-bin decoder can run up to 45MHz, and the total area is only 42K gates.