A Low-Power High-Performance H.264/AVC Intra-Frame Encoder for 1080pHD Video

H.264/AVC intra-frame encoding contains several computation-intensive coding tools that form a long data dependency loop that is difficult to speed up. In this paper, we present a low-power and high-performance H.264/AVC intra-frame encoder. We propose several novel approaches to alleviate the performance bottleneck caused by the long data dependency loop among 4 × 4 luma blocks, integrate an efficient CABAC entropy encoder, and apply a clock-gating technique to reduce power consumption. Synthesized into a TSMC 0.13 μm CMOS cell library, our design requires 265.3 K gates at 114 MHz and consumes 23.56 mW to encode 1080pHD (1920 × 1088) video sequences at 30 frames per second (fps). It also delivers the same video quality as the H.264/AVC reference software. Compared with all state-of-the-art designs, our design has a lower working frequency and achieves both better bit-rate saving and lower power consumption.