A high-performance MPEG4 bitstream processing core

Entropy coding is one of the main techniques for lossless data compression in many multimedia applications. In video and image coding standards such as JPEG, MPEG1/2/4, and H.26x, the most often used entropy coding techniques include run-length coding and variable-length coding. Due to the demands of high quality video compression like DTV or HDTV, the complexity of entropy coding increases significantly. This fact motivates the design of the high performance entropy decoder proposed in this paper. The proposed IP core exploits the concurrent operations in the MPEG4 entropy decoding to achieve high performance in terms of limited hardware cost. The implementation results show that the proposed IP core operates at 125 MHz clock frequency (i.e. 2000 Mbit/s) with the cost of 0.22 mm² silicon area based on a 0.25 um CMOS technology.