An improved decoding method of coeff_token element for H.264 CAVLC decoder

In the design of CAVLC decoder, it is very important to reduce hardware overhead and power consumption. Since the decoding circuit of the coeff_token element costs a lot of logic resources, this paper proposed an improved decoding method of coeff_token element for H.264 CAVLC decoder. The major contribution is summarized as follows. First, a decoder module using combinational logic is developed for the high frequency code words appeared in video sequence to improve the decoding speed and the maximum frequency. Second, for the other code words, we store them in the memories. A new memory organization strategy is proposed to reduce the memory consumption. Experiment results show that, the memory consumption is about 42.4 % less than Yong Ho Moon et al. (2008) and 54.6% less than Xiong Quingqing (2007) by using the new strategy.