FPGA Design of an Intra 16 × 16 Module for H.264/AVC Video Encoder

In this paper, we propose novel hardware architecture for intra 16 × 16 module for the macroblock engine of a new video coding standard H.264. To reduce the cycle of intra prediction 16 × 16, transform/quantization, and inverse quantization/inverse transform of H.264, an advanced method for different operation is proposed. This architecture can process one macroblock in 208 cycles for all cases of macroblock type by processing 4 × 4 Hadamard transform and quantization during 16 × 16 prediction. This module was designed using VHDL Hardware Description Language (HDL) and works with a 160 MHz frequency using ALTERA NIOS-II de-velopment board with Stratix II EP2S60F1020C3 FPGA. The system also includes software running on an NIOS-II processor in order to implementing the pre-processing and the post-processing functions. Finally, the execution time of our HW solution is decreased by 26 % when compared with the previous work