A 48 Cycles/MB H.264/AVC Deblocking Filter Architecture for Ultra High Definition Applications

Dajiang ZHOU  Jinjia ZHOU  Jiayi ZHU  Satoshi GOTO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E92-A    No.12    pp.3203-3210
Publication Date: 2009/12/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E92.A.3203
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: Embedded, Real-Time and Reconfigurable Systems
Keyword: 
H.264/AVC,  parallel,  deblocking,  ultra high resolution,  QFHD,  

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Summary: 
In this paper, a highly parallel deblocking filter architecture for H.264/AVC is proposed to process one macroblock in 48 clock cycles and give real-time support to QFHD@60 fps sequences at less than 100 MHz. 4 edge filters organized in 2 groups for simultaneously processing vertical and horizontal edges are applied in this architecture to enhance its throughput. While parallelism increases, pipeline hazards arise owing to the latency of edge filters and data dependency of deblocking algorithm. To solve this problem, a zig-zag processing schedule is proposed to eliminate the pipeline bubbles. Data path of the architecture is then derived according to the processing schedule and optimized through data flow merging, so as to minimize the cost of logic and internal buffer. Meanwhile, the architecture's data input rate is designed to be identical to its throughput, while the transmission order of input data can also match the zig-zag processing schedule. Therefore no intercommunication buffer is required between the deblocking filter and its previous component for speed matching or data reordering. As a result, only one 2464 two-port SRAM as internal buffer is required in this design. When synthesized with SMIC 130 nm process, the architecture costs a gate count of 30.2 k, which is competitive considering its high performance.