Application design trajectory towards reusable coprocessors - MPEG case study

This work presents a structured application design trajectory to transform media-processing applications - modeled as Kahn process network - into a set of function-specific hardware units called coprocessors. The proposed design trajectory focuses on identifying hardware-implementable computation kernels that are common for a predetermined set of applications. The design trajectory is exercised in a case study that maps MPEG video decoding and encoding applications onto a set of coprocessors in a heterogeneous multiprocessor architecture. The resulting set of coprocessors can simultaneously perform both encoding and decoding functions for multiple MPEG-2 streams in an estimated 4 mm² (excluding memory) in 0.18 μ technology.