Low-Power AVC/H.264 Baseline Profile Decoder Core

The H264-LD-BP IP core implements a silicon and energy efficient hardware video decoder able to process H.264 streams produced by the H264-E-BPS, H264-E-BPF and H264-E-BIS video encoder cores available from CAST.

The H264-LD-BP is extremely small, requiring less than 100K gates and 80k bits of infernal memory. Its small silicon footprint, low bandwidth requirements, and zero software overhead enable extremely cost-effective and low-power ASIC and FPGA implementations.

The H264-LD-BP is designed for straightforward, trouble-free SoC integration. It operates on a stand-alone basis such that decoding proceeds without any assistance or input from the host processor. The decoder’s memory interface—used to store reconstructed video data—is extremely flexible: it operates on a separate clock domain, is independent from the external memory type and memory controller, and is tolerant to large latencies. The decoder reports decompressed video parameters, detects and reports bit stream errors to the system, and simplifies video cropping at its output. The core is optionally delivered with a raster-to-block converter, and wrappers for AMBA® AHB, AXI, or AXI-Streaming buses are available.

Customers can further decrease their time to market by using CAST’s integration services to receive complete video encoding/decoding subsystems. These integrate the decoder core with video encoders, video and networking interface controllers, networking stacks, or other CAST or third-party IP cores.

The H264-LD-BP IP core is designed using with industry best practices and has been multiple times production proven. Its deliverables include a complete verification environment and a bit-accurate software model.