An Efficient Architecture of Forward Transforms and Quantization for H.264/AVC Codecs

Abstract

Thanks to many novel coding tools, H.264/AVC has become the most efficient video compression standardproviding much better performance than previous standards. However, this standard comes with an extraordinarycomputational complexity and a huge memory access requirement, which make the hardware architecture design muchmore difficult and costly, especially for realtime applications.In the framework of H.264 codec hardware architecture project, this paper presents an efficient architecture of ForwardTransform and Quantization (FTQ) for H.264/AVC codecs in mobile applications. To reduce the hardware implementationoverhead, the proposed design uses only one unified architecture of 1-D transform engine to perform all required transformprocesses, including discrete cosine transform and Walsh Hadamard transform. This design also enables to share the commonparts among multipliers that have the same multiplicands. The performance of the design is taken into considerationand improved by using a fast architecture of the multiplier in the quantizer, the most critical component in the design.Experimental results show that our architecture can completely finish transform and quantization processes for a 4:2:0macroblock in 228 clock cycles and the achieved throughput is 445Msamples/s at 250MHz operating frequency while thearea overhead is very small, 147755?m2 (approximate 15KGates), with the 130nm TSMC CMOS technology.