An Efficient VLC Encoder Architecture for H.264

Variable length coding (VLC) is a widely used technique for data compression. Exp-Golomb VLC is adopted for entropy coding in H.264, the latest developed video coding standard. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture of Exp-Golomb VLC encoder in which the codewords can be constructed by using the modified coding number technique. It results that our proposed encoder can be implemented with less area than other VLC encoders. 0.18 mu TSMC cell library technology is used to synthesize the encoder. The area of the proposed architecture is 615 gates and the critical path delay is less than 6 ns. Therefore, it is suitable for low cost multimedia applications