A 385 MHz 13.54 K Gates Delay Balanced Two-Level CAVLC Decoder for Ultra HD H.264/AVC Video

To satisfy the heavy performance requirement in real-time high-resolution H.264/AVC, very large-scale integrated implementation of the entropy decoder is necessary since it dominates the overall decoder throughput. In this paper, we propose a high-throughput delay balanced two-level context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) decoder with 21% shorter critical path delay in comparison to the traditional two-level decoder design. Furthermore, redundant decoding processes are removed by a skipping mechanism. The proposed CAVLC decoder only needs 127.13 cycles per macroblock on average to support level 5.1 decoding with 13.54k gate counts under 90-nm CMOS technology.