A high-performance CABAC encoder architecture for HEVC and H.264/AVC

Abstract

This paper presents a high-performance context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) architecture for the next-generation UHDTV applications. Its maximum throughput has been enhanced by 31%~34% with the proposed pre-normalization (prenorm.), hybrid path coverage (HPC), bypass bin splitting (BPBS) and state dual-transition (SDT) schemes. Both the HEVC and H.264/AVC formats can be supported with our architecture by applying a dualstandard binarization design. The proposed CABAC architecture has been silicon proven in a 65nm video encoder chip. It delivers 4.27~4.40 bins/cycle with synthesized and measured clock rates of 401.5MHz and 330MHz, respectively. Therefore a high performance of 1.452Gbin/s is achieved for real-time UHDTV encoding.