Media processing with field-programmable gate arrays on a microprocessor's local bus

The Chidi system is a PCI-bus media processor card which performs its processing tasks on a large field-programmable gate array (Altera 10K100) in conjunction with a general purpose CPU (PowerPC 604e). Special address-generation and buffering logic (also implemented on FPGAs) allows the reconfigurable processor to share a local bus with the CPU, turning burst accesses to memory into continuous streams and converting between the memory's 64-bit words and the media data types. In this paper we present the design requirements for the Chidi system, describe the hardware architecture, and discuss the software model for its use in media processing.