A Highly Integrated 8mW H.264/AVC Main Profile Real-time CIF Video Decoder on a 16MHz SoC Platform

We present a hardwired decoder prototype for H.264/AVC main profile video. Our design takes as its input compressed H.264/AVC bit-stream and produces as its output video frames ready for display. We wrap the decoder core with an AMBA-AHB bus interface and integrate it into a multimedia SoC platform. Several architectural innovations at both IP and system levels are proposed to achieve very high performance at very low operating frequency. Running at 16MHz, our FPGA demo system is able to real-time decode CIF (352 times 288) video at 30 frames per second. Moreover, we take system cost into consideration such that only a single external SDRAM is needed and memory traffic minimized.