A pipelined 8x8 2-D forward DCT hardware architecture for H.264/AVC high profile encoder

This paper presents the hardware design of an W bi-dimensional Forward Discrete Cosine Transform used in the high profiles of the H.264/AVC video coding standard. The designed DCT is computed in a separate way as two 1-D transforms. It uses only add and shift operations, avoiding multiplications. The architecture contains one datapath for each 1-D DCT with a transpose buffer between them. The complete architecture was synthesized to Xilinx Virtex II - Pro and Altera Stratix II FPGAs and to TSMC 0.35 mu m standard-cells technology. The synthesis results show that the 2-D DCT transform architecture reached the necessary throughput to encode high definition videos in real-time when considering all target technologies.