A HW CABAC encoder with efficient context access scheme for H.264/AVC

In this paper, we propose a hardware Context-based Binary Arithmetic Coder (CABAC) targeting the main profile of H.264/AVC standard. The encoder fully supports different coding modes including RDO coding. An efficient memory access scheme is proposed and shown to reduce context memory access rate, context memory size, and RDO context state backup and restore operation delay. Coding throughput of 1 bin/cycle is achieved by pipelined structure. The encoder is physical implemented with 362 MHz clock frequency and power reduction technique is also utilized.