Design space exploration on the H.264 4/spl times/4 Hadamard transform

This paper presents a design space exploration on the forward 4/spl times/4 Hadamard transform used in the H.264/AVC video coding standard. Five implementations alternatives for this transform were designed. These implementations were described in VHDL and their synthesis was directed to an Altera Stratix device. It is important to point out that the throughputs of all the presented implementations are enough for its use in H.264 codecs for HDTV. The implementations throughputs vary from 146 millions to billions of samples per second.