A Self-Reconfigurable Multimedia Player on FPGA

With the hype of multimedia devices, many different audio and video formats have appeared in recent years. The sales of portable multimedia players like Apple´s ipod have also experiment and incredible growth. These devices are usually based on general purpose microprocessors and, when a new audio or video format appears, a software upgrade is needed or, in the worst case, the new format will not be supported by the player. This work presents a novel implementation where an FPGA based multimedia player makes use of the self-reconfiguration capabilities of modern FPGA families in order to support new multimedia formats. When the player needs to play a song with a non-supported format it securely downloads the required hardware from Internet and reprograms the FPGA with the new codec