A High Throughput VLSI Architecture Design for H.264 Context-Based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Decoding with Look Ahead Parsing

In this paper we present a high throughput VLSI architecture design for context-based adaptive binary arithmetic decoding (CABAD) in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. To speed-up the inherent sequential operations in CABAD, we break down the processing bottleneck by proposing a look-ahead codeword parsing technique on the segmenting context tables with cache registers, which averagely reduces up to 53% of cycle count. Based on a 0.18 mum CMOS technology, the proposed design outperforms the existing design by both reducing 40% of hardware cost and achieving about 1.6 times data throughput at the same time