VLSI Design of a High-Performance Multicontext MQ Arithmetic Coder

The MQ arithmetic coding, which is an adaptive arithmetic coding developing from Q coding, has become a major throughput bottleneck of JPEG2000 compression due to its inherent serial operations. To overcome the bottleneck, this brief proposes a high-performance hardware architecture of the multicontext MQ coder. The proposed architecture is capable of concurrent coding for two adjacent more probable symbols (MPSs). Performance analysis results show that the proposed coder consumes 1.61 CXD pairs per cycle and achieves a throughput of 506.93 MSymbols/s under 0.5 bpp bit rate. The proposed architecture not only achieves high throughput, but also maintains both low hardware utilization and low power consumption. Compared with the state-of-the-art two-context coder, the figure of merit (FoM) is increased by 38%. Compared with the single-context coder, the power-delay product (PDP) is reduced by 49%.