A highly parallel and scalable CABAC decoder for next generation video coding

This paper presents a silicon prototype for a pre-standard algorithm developed for HEVC ("H.265") called Massively Parallel CABAC (MP CABAC) that addresses a key video decoder bottleneck. The test chip has over an order-of-magnitude higher throughput than state-of-the-art H.264/AVC CABAC engines, while maintaining high coding efficiency. Architecture and joint algorithm-architecture optimizations, which modify the MP-CABAC algo rithm, are used to reduce critical path delay and memory size.