Design of Bitstream Co-processor for Multimedia Applications

Abstract

Variable length coding (VLC) is widely used in the entropy codec part of various video codec standards. Its parallelism is difficult to be developed due to its inherent bit-serial characteristic. As it becomes the system bottleneck of real-time video decoding, this paper presents a bitstream co-processor which greatly accelerates the codec of VLC by designing corresponding bitstream instructions. With SuperV DSP as the research prototype, the area cost of the bitstream co-processor only increases by 1.71% while the performance of the application of entropy decoding is improved about 73% on average.