A High-Throughput and Multi-Parallel VLSI Architecture for HEVC Deblocking Filter

This paper presents a high-throughput and multi-parallel VLSI hardware architecture for the deblocking filter in the HEVC video coding standard. First, an implementation-friendly and fast boundary judgment method is proposed to avoid using the original recursion loop approach. Then a dedicated parallel VLSI architecture composed of four parallel filtering cores is presented based on the proposed boundary judgment method. With the parallel luma/chroma filtering and parallel vertical/horizontal edges filtering order, the proposed VLSI architecture can process filtering operations for one largest coding unit (LCU) with less filtering cycles than other conventional approaches. Furthermore, filtering efficiency is improved due to a novel ping-pang buffer architecture and the on-chip single-port SRAM with dedicated data arrangement in the memory modules. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deblocking filter architecture improves the performance by 28-89% at the expense of the slightly increased gate count compared to the previously known architecture in HEVC. The proposed architecture can reach a high operating clock frequency of 278 MHz with TSMC 90 nm library and meet the real time requirement of the deblocking filter for 8 K × 4 K video format at 123 frame/s.