High-speed Huffman decoder architectures

The author presents pipelined and parallel architectures for high-speed implementation of Huffman decoders using look-ahead computation techniques. Huffman decoders are used in high-definition television, video, and other data compression systems. The achievable speed in these decoders is inherently limited due to their sequential nature of computation. The unequal code word length of the Huffman code words makes it difficult to apply look-ahead. This problem is overcome by representing Huffman decoders as finite state machines which can exploit look-ahead. The proposed approach is useful for high-speed Huffman decoder implementations where the number of symbols of the decoder is low