Low power hardware design for entropy coding of H.264/AVC baseline profile encoder is urgent for the increasing mobile applications. However, previous works are poor in the power performance. In this paper, the first low power Context-based Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) scheme named the Side Information Aided (SIA) Symbol Look Ahead (SLA) one-pass CAVLC is proposed, with the non-zero and abs-one SIA flags. A reconfigurable architecture for the SLA module is also proposed to support the low power CAVLC scheme efficiently. The resultant hardware power is reduced by 69% to