A new 3-phase design exploration methodology for video processor design

When making video processor design, conventional design exploration methodologies take extremely long time in parameter optimization but the final design may not necessarily meet the application requirements since the architecture cannot deviate too much from the initial design. To speed up the design process, statistical performance models were used to guide the simulation; however their accuracy is questionable. In this paper, a new 3-phase design exploration methodology for video processor is proposed. It makes use of an almost cycle-accurate performance model to provide information for refining the processor architecture. It can derive the optimal architecture in a much shorter period of time than the conventional methods. We successfully implemented a few video coding/decoding applications on the video processor derived from the proposed methodology. Simulation results show that it outperforms other video processors in both cost and performance perspectives.