In this letter, we present a design of a single chip video decoder called advanced mobile video ASIC (A-MoVa) for mobile multimedia applications. This chip uses a mixed hardware/software architecture to improve both its performance and its flexibility. We designed the chip using a partition between the hardware and software blocks, and developed the architecture of an H.264 decoder based on the system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform. This chip contains 290,000 logic gates, 670,000 memory gates, and its size is $7.5;mm{ imes}7.5;mm$ (using 0.25 micron 4-layers metal CMOS technology).