High-throughput CABAC codec architecture for HEVC

A VLSI architecture of a context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) entropy codec for high-efficiency video coding (HEVC), the next generation video coding standard, is presented and analysis of its performance in terms of effective processing throughput, i.e. bin/s, is provided. For high throughput, the architecture is designed to process up to two regular bins per unit time while minimising pipeline stall due to inherent dependencies of CABAC through various optimisations including context forwarding and speculative decoding. The experiments show that the effective throughput is achieved up to 1.60 bins or 1.41 bits per cycle, which corresponds to 469.5 Mbit/s at the operating frequency of 333 MHz, under practical video coding environments.