A Frame-Parallel 2 Gpixel/s Video Decoder Chip for UHDTV and 3-DTV/FTV Applications

The first single-chip design that supports real-time H.264/Advanced Video Coding decoding of 8k (7680×4320) 60 frames/s is realized. It also supports multiview decoding for up to 32720p views or 161080p views. To significantly improve the throughput and reduce the memory bandwidth requirement, frame-level parallelism is exploited for the proposed design. First, a frame dependency protection scheme enables frame-parallel decoding, by reusing multiple replicas of an existing design. This results in a system throughput of 2 Gpixels/s, at least 3.75 times better than previous chips. Moreover, a reference window synchronization scheme and a 2-level hybrid caching structure are proposed to achieve 44% memory bandwidth reduction of motion compensation, by utilizing frame-level data reuse. The bandwidth reduction results in 22% Dynamic Random-Access Memory power saving of the whole decoder.