An efficient VLSI architecture for 4×4 intra prediction in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard

Intra prediction with fine directions is a critical feature in the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard because it provides significant performance gain. Different from the intra prediction in the H.264/AVC, this approach is more complicated in terms of computation and memory access, which makes the VLSI design very difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient uniform architecture for all of the 4×4 intra directional modes. The architecture is implemented by a register array and a flexible reference sample selection technique. This novel architecture does not need to project the samples from the side reference to the main reference. Thus, it reduces the processing latency and the number of registers considerably. The proposed architecture has been implemented with TSMC 0.13μm CMOS technology. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture only needs 9020 logic gates for 17 directional modes and can run at 150 MHz operation frequency.