Hardware Implementation of DCT and CAVLC for H.264/AVC based on Co-design

Abstract

In this paper, DCT(Discrete Cosine Transform) and CAVLC(Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding) are co-designed as hardware IP with software operation of the other modules in H.264/AVC codec. In order to increase the operation speed, a new method using SHIFT table is proposed. As a result, enhancement of about 16(%) in the operation speed is obtained. Designed Hardware IPs are downloaded into Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA in the ML-410 development board and H.264/AVC encoding is performed with Microblaze CPU implemented in FPGA. Software modules are developed from JM13.2 to make C code. In order to verify the designed Hardware IPs, Modelsim program is used for functional simulation. As a result that all Hardware IPs and software modules are downloaded into the FPGA, improvement of processing speed about multiples of 16 in case of DCT hardware IP and multiples of 10 in case of CAVLC compared with software-only processing. Although this paper deals with co-design of H/W and S/W for H.264, it can be utilized for the other embedded system design.