Application analysis and communication aspects for future multimedia architectures

A principal challenge for reducing the cost of complex systems-on-chip is to pursue more generic systems for a broad range of products. For this purpose, we explore three new architectural concepts for state-of-the-art video applications. First, we discuss a reusable scalable hardware architecture employing a hierarchical communication network fitting with the natural hierarchy of the application. In a case study, we show that MPEG streaming in DTV occurs at high level, while subsystems communicate at lower levels. The second concept is a software design that scales over a number of processors to enable reuse over a range of VLSI process technologies. We explore this via an H.264 decoder implementation that scales nearly linearly over up to eight processors by applying data partitioning. The third concept is resource-scalability, which is required to satisfy real-time constraints in a system with a high amount of shared resources. An example complexity-scalable MPEG-2 encoder scales the required cycle budget with a factor of three, in parallel with a smooth degradation of quality.