A conflict-free multi-symbol arithmetic encoder for H.264/AVC

This paper proposed a conflict-free multi-symbol arithmetic encoder (AE) for H.264/AVC. The throughput of a multi-symbol AE is usually limited by concurrent access of context memory which degrades the performance of the whole H.264/AVC encoder. With proposed Hybrid Context Memory architectures (HCM), about 1/10 contexts under critical conflict are implemented by Critical Register Array to solve the insufficient ports bottleneck. The number of encoding symbol per cycle is improved by 15% and 55.5% in 2-symbol and 4-symbol version, respectively. The implementation results also show that the hardware design can achieve a high encoding rate and throughput comparing to the previous works.