An Efficient Reference Frame Storage Scheme for H.264 HDTV Decoder

This paper proposes an efficient reference frame storage scheme for HDTV VLSI decoder to reduce external memory bandwidth requirement. The proposed scheme consists of the pixel duplication mechanism and the L-C (luma-chroma) correlated mapping method. Pixel duplication completely eliminates the possibility of an access crossing word boundary and therefore substantially increases the memory bandwidth efficiency. L-C correlated mapping exploits address relationships between the luma and chroma reference pixels and largely reduces bank conflict overhead of memory accesses. The two mechanisms combined together efficiently improve the bandwidth usage: up to 47% bandwidth in worst case is saved compared with the previous schemes, and 25% in average case