An adaptive pipelining scheme for H.264/AVC context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding(CABAC) decoder for high definition(HD) applications is proposed to solve data hazard problems coming from the data dependencies in CABAC decoding process.An efficiency model of CABAC decoding pipeline is derived according to the analysis of a common pipeline.Based on that,several adaptive strategies are provided.The pipelining scheme with these strategies can be adaptive to different types of syntax elements(SEs) and the pipeline will not stall during decoding process when these strategies are adopted.In addition,the decoder proposed can fully support H.264/AVC high4:2:2 profile and the experimental results show that the efficiency of decoder is much higher than other architectures with one engine.Taking both performance and cost into consideration,our design makes a good tradeoff compared with other work and it is sufficient for HD real-time decoding.
