High throughput VLSI architecture supporting HEVC loop filter for Ultra HDTV

In-Loop filtering in HEVC/H.265 is one of most computation intensive block taking around 15-20% of overall complexity for decoding. The loop filtering in HEVC is more sophisticated with introduction of Sample adaptive offset (SAO) filter in addition to de-blocking filter in comparison to H.264. In this paper, very high performance as well as area efficient VLSI architecture is proposed for HEVC decoder, which supports 4K@60fps for next generation Ultra HDTV at 200 MHz clock. The design can process Largest Coding Unit (LCU) of size 64×64 in less than 1200 cycles with performance directly scaling down based on LCU size. The architecture consists of LCU level pipelining across de-blocking and SAO filtering with four & three stage internal pipeline within each block. The architectures proposes fully on-the-fly filtering avoiding memory bandwidth, custom filtering order as well as scanning, 4×4 based block processing and FIFO based asynchronous architecture to achieve high performance. The final design in 28nm CMOS process is expected to take around 0.2 mm2 after actual place & route. The proposed design is capable of handling 4K@60fps as well as fully compliant to HEVC video standard specification including all corner conditions handling like slice and tiles processing via generic region definition.