A fully pipelined CABAC coder using syntax element instructions driving

Abstract

Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coder (CABAC) is an essential part in the H.264 main profile video encoder to generate final bitstream. With the development of large-scale parallel H.264 encoder and the high definition video requirement, it increasingly poses a bottleneck in the video encoding path of the parallel encoders. This paper proposes a fully pipelined hardware CABAC coder to speed up the bitstream generation, which is suitable for accelerating a node processor in a manycore chip. The coder employs a CPU-like execution style and using the Syntax Elements Instructions (SEI) to drive the pipeline. Synthesis results with SIMC 0.13um technology show that with an area of 3.21K logic gates, 3.5K RAM bits and 34.375K ROM bits, this design can achieve a high throughput of 590Mbps, basically supporting the real-time HD video coding1.