SummaryThis paper presents a hardware design capable of supporting high‐efficiency video coding inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) with a 32×32 transform unit size, using a single 1‐D IDCT core with transpose memory to reduce costs. The proposed 1‐D IDCT core employs 16 computation paths for high throughput and is implemented using distributed arithmetic to facilitate the sharing of hardware resources. The proposed 1‐D IDCT is capable of calculating 1‐D and 2‐D data simultaneously along 32 parallel paths. When implemented using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 40‐nm CMOS technology, the proposed 2‐D transform core provides throughput of 6.4 gigapixels/s with a gate count of 335 k. The results show that a superior hardware efficiency can be achieved in the proposed 32‐point IDCT core compared with the existing works. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.