High throughput architecture for H.264/AVC forward transforms block

This paper presents a high throughput hardware for the complete H.264/AVC forward transforms block. There are three different transform inside this block and the presented architecture synchronizes these transforms, generating a constant processing rate in its outputs. This is an important characteristic of this architecture that was designed to be easily integrated to the other H.264/AVC blocks. The architecture does not use memory bits and the transforms in two dimensions are calculated directly, without the use of the separability property. The architecture was described in VHDL and was validated and prototyped using a Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA. The synthesis was directed to a VP30 FPGA and to a TSMC 0.35μm standard-cell technology. The throughputs of the T block architecture for these two different technologies reaches a processing rate higher than 120 million of samples per second, allowing its use in H.264/AVC codecs directed to HDTV.