Toward hardware building blocks for software-only real-time video processing: the MOVIE approach

The goal of the MOVIE very large-scale integration chip is to facilitate the development of software-only solutions for real-time video processing applications. This chip can be seen as a building block for single-instruction, multiple-data processing, and its architecture has been designed so as to facilitate high-level language programming. The basic architecture building block associates a subarray of computation processors with an I/O processor. A module can be seen as a small linear, systolic-like array of processing elements, connected at each end to the I/O processor. The module can communicate with its two nearest neighbors via two communication ports. The chip architecture also includes three 16-bit video ports. One important aspect in the programming environment is the C-stolic programming language. C stolic is a C-like language augmented with parallel constructs, which allow the differentiation between the array controller variables (scalar variables) and the local variables in the array structure (systolic variables). A statement operating on systolic variables implies a simultaneous execution on all the cells of the structure. Implementation examples of MOVIE-based architectures dealing with video compression algorithms are given.

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