|
Hardware/Software Co-Design for Image Processing
Abstract:
The success of an innovative electronic system (hardware and software) depends
always more on the capacity of join flexibility, modularity, efficiency
and implementation costs.
Due to the increasing complexity of applications, the developers of new servic
es
and the building industries are in the continue research of innovative
methods and tools
of work which allow to improve the creativity and productivity of its own
design cycle.
Riprogrammability, miniaturization and limitation of costs involve the
availability of design tools at system level (Electronic System Design
Automation), able to develop and validate an application with description
model always more concises.
The challenge posed by the multimedia technology is very attractive
and stimulates the research and development of new methodologies for
hardware-software co-design.
In particular, the family of MPEG standards for video coding is an effective
case study to test a co-design methodology: they are all based on the same
base set of tools (DCT, Scalar Quantization, Huffman coding,
Motion Compensation) with modifications, sometimes slight, concerning the
syntax of the bitstream and, in general, the programmability and
configuration of some tools (e.g. different prediction modes in Motion
Compensation). Software modules could solve the ri-programmability
problem if well integrated with hardware application-specific modules
which should solve the computation and data-intensive problem.
In this paper an hardware-software integrated methodology
for applications tuned on an embedded architecture is described and
some results on a case study are reported.
The case study used is a core subset of all DCT-based video decoders
which includes Inverse Quantization, Inverse DCT and Motion Compensation.
The aim of the study is to highlight the specific necessities of computation
intensive algorithms (in respect with control dominated algorithms) and their
impaction on the development of the hardware-software co-design methodology.
UCB Design Technology Warehouse Homepage
|
