In this paper, VLSI architecture of a joint parameter decoder is proposed to realize the calculation of motion vector (MV), intra prediction mode (IPM) and boundary strength (BS) for ultra high definition H.264/AVC applications. For this architecture, a 64-cycle-per-MB pipeline with simplified control modes is designed to increase system throughput and reduce hardware cost. Moreover, in order to save memory bandwidth, the data which includes the motion information for the co-located picture and the last decoded line, is pre-processed before being stored to DRAM. A partition based storage format is applied to condense the MB level data, while variable length coding based compression method is utilized to reduce the data size in each partition. Experimental results show our design is capable of real-time 38402160@60 fps decoding at less than 133 MHz, with 37.2 k logic gates. Meanwhile, by applying the proposed scheme, 85-98% bandwidth saving is achieved, compared with storing the original information for every 44 block to DRAM.

In this paper, a highly parallel deblocking filter architecture for H.264/AVC is proposed to process one macroblock in 48 clock cycles and give real-time support to QFHD@60 fps sequences at less than 100 MHz. 4 edge filters organized in 2 groups for simultaneously processing vertical and horizontal edges are applied in this architecture to enhance its throughput. While parallelism increases, pipeline hazards arise owing to the latency of edge filters and data dependency of deblocking algorithm. To solve this problem, a zig-zag processing schedule is proposed to eliminate the pipeline bubbles. Data path of the architecture is then derived according to the processing schedule and optimized through data flow merging, so as to minimize the cost of logic and internal buffer. Meanwhile, the architecture's data input rate is designed to be identical to its throughput, while the transmission order of input data can also match the zig-zag processing schedule. Therefore no intercommunication buffer is required between the deblocking filter and its previous component for speed matching or data reordering. As a result, only one 2464 two-port SRAM as internal buffer is required in this design. When synthesized with SMIC 130 nm process, the architecture costs a gate count of 30.2 k, which is competitive considering its high performance.