Vlsi implementation of an entropy encoder for H.264/AVC baseline

In this paper, we implement a complete entropy encoder for H.264/AVC baseline profile composed of a CAVLC unit, an Exp-Golomb coding unit and a bit stream packer which can pack the bit stream in format of network abstraction layer (NAL). The encoder is implemented with SYNOPSYS Design Compiler and SMIC 0.18 um cell library. The result shows that our design costs less area than the prior work in (Tung-Chien Chen, 2005) and it can work at frequency up to 200 MHZ. In the worst case, it takes 1905 circles to encode a macro block and can process 1844 QCIF (176 x 144) frames per second.