In this paper, we present a high performance and low power hard-ware architecture for real-time implementation of Context Adap-tive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) algorithm used in H.264 / MPEG4 Part 10 video coding standard. This hardware is designed to be used as part of a complete low power H.264 video coding system for portable applications. The proposed architecture is im-plemented in Verilog HDL. The Verilog RTL code is verified to work at 76 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA and it is verified to work at 233 MHz in a 0.18´ ASIC implementation. The FPGA and ASIC implementations can code 22 and 67 VGA frames (640x480) per second respectively
