An 8K@120fps Advanced Entropy Coding Hardware Design for AVS3

The third generation audio video coding standard (AVS3) is the latest video coding standard developed by the China AVS working group. The advanced entropy coding (AEC) tool in AVS3 has critical bin-to-bin data dependencies leading to difficulties in parallelization. The use of a 16384-entries lookup table (LUT) in the AEC context update algorithm poses challenges in balancing area and performance. To address these issues, we propose a high-performance, area-efficient hardware design. Firstly, we introduce a novel multicycle-path parallel architecture and optimize area cost through hardware reuse. Next, we construct a context modeling processing unit to replace the large LUT, significantly reducing area. Finally, we propose a new LUT-free dual-context modeling processing unit, effectively resolving critical paths introduced by parallel context conflicts. As a result, our design processes 2.63 bins per cycle. The synthesis results based on the GlobalFoundries’ 28nm process indicate that its maximum frequency is 990MHz, with an overall throughput of 2604 Mbin/s. Compared to state-of-the-art designs, our design leads in performance by 24.7% while reducing area by 28%.