A high performance and low cost hardware architecture for H.264 transform and quantization algorithms

In this paper, we present a high performance and low cost hardware architecture for real-time implementation of forward transform and quantization and inverse transform and quantization algorithms used in H.264 / MPEG4 Part 10 video coding standard. The hardware architecture is based on a reconfigurable datapath with only one multiplier. This hardware is designed to be used as part of a complete low power H.264 video coding system for portable applications. The proposed architecture is implemented in Verilog HDL. The Verilog RTL code is verified to work at 81 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA and it is verified to work at 210 MHz in a 0.18µ ASIC implementation. The FPGA and ASIC implementations can code 27 and 70 VGA frames (640×480) per second respectively.