H.264 parallel decoder at HD resolution on a coarse-grained reconfigurable multi-media system

Reconfigurable Multi-media System (REMUS) is a new coarse-grained reconfigurable processor. This paper describes the parallel implementation of H.264 decoding algorithm on REMUS. First, the pipelined parallel decoding technique is introduced to loosen the strict constraint of real-time decoding. Second, the most computing intensive tasks, such as Motion Compensation (MC), Deblocking and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT), are mapped onto the reconfigurable Processing Element Array (PEA), while the other control-intensive tasks are carried out by the host processor. Simulation shows that based on proposed approaches, REMUS can support H.264 High-Profile (HiP) Level 4 1920×1080@30fps streams at 200 MHz.