A New H.264/AVC CAVLC Parallel Decoding Circuit

A new effective parallel decoding method has been developed for context-based adaptive variable length codes. In this paper, several new design ideas have been devised for scalable parallel processing, less area, and less power. First, simplified logical operations instead of memory look-ups are used for fast low power operations. Second the codes are grouped based on their lengths for efficient logical operation. Third, up to M bits of input are simultaneously analyzed. For comparison, we have designed the logical operation based parallel decoder for M=8 and a typical conventional method based decoder. High speed parallel decoding is possible with our method. For similar decoding rates (1.57codes/cycle for M=8), our new approach uses 46% less area than the typical conventional method.