Design of Low Power H.264 Decoder Using Adaptive Pipeline

H.264 video coding standard is widely used due to the high compression rate and quality. H.264 decoders usually have pipeline architecture by a macroblock or a sub-block. The period of the pipeline is usually fixed to guarantee the operation in the worst case which results in many idle cycles and the requirement of high data bandwidth and high performance processing units. We propose adaptive pipeline architecture for H.264 decoders for efficient decoding and lower the requirement of the bandwidth for the memory bus. Parameters and coefficients are delivered using hand-shaking communication through dedicated interconnections and frame pixel data are transferred using AMBA AHB network. The processing time of each block is variable depending on the characteristics of images, and the processing units start to work whenever they are ready. An H.264 decoder is designed and implemented using the proposed architecture to verify the operation using an FPGA.