A highly parallel architecture for deblocking filter in H.264/AVC

This paper presents a highly parallel architecture for deblocking filter in H.264/AVC. We adopt various parallel schemes in memory sub-system and datapath. A 2-dimensional parallel memory scheme is employed to support efficient parallel access in both horizontal and vertical directions in order to speed up the whole filtering process. This parallel memory also eliminates the need for a transpose circuit. In the datapath, an algorithm optimization is performed to implement parallel filtering with hardware reuse. Pipeline techniques are also adopted to improve the throughput of filtering operations. Our design is implemented under TSMC 0.18 μm technology. Results show that the core size is 0.82 × 1.13mm² when the maximum frequency is 230 MHz. Compared to other existing architectures, our design has advantages in both speed and area.