A fully pipelined CABAC coder using syntax element instructions driving

Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coder (CABAC) is an essential part in the H.264 main profile video encoder to generate final bitstream. With the development of large-scale parallel H.264 encoder and the high definition video requirement, it increasingly poses a bottleneck in the video encoding path of the parallel encoders. This paper proposes a fully pipelined hardware CABAC coder to speed up the bitstream generation, which is suitable for accelerating a node processor in a manycore chip. The coder employs a CPU-like execution style and using the Syntax Elements Instructions (SEI) to drive the pipeline. Synthesis results with SIMC 0.13 um technology show that with an area of 3.21 K logic gates, 3.5 K RAM bits and 34.375 K ROM bits, this design can achieve a high throughput of 590 Mbps, basically supporting the real-time HD video coding.