High-Profile H.264 has been adopted as the major coding standard in recently popular high definition video due to its excellent coding efficiency. Several implementations have been developed [1-3], but, their performance is limited to baseline 720p [1,2] or SDTV [3]. The main stream 1080p high-profile application presents a series of new design challenges in throughput, cost and power because of at least a 4× higher complexity than in the 720p baseline. Thus, a 0.13μm 1080p high-profile H.264 video encoder is presented with 10mm2 core and 242mW power. Compared to a state-of-the-art 720p baseline design [2], this design achieves a 46.7% and 54% reduction in area and power, respectively. These savings are from parallelism enhanced throughput and a cross-stage sharing pipeline. The chip specification and features are summarized in Figure 16.5.1.