Versatile PC/FPGA based verification/fast prototyping platform with multimedia applications

A PC/FPGA based verification/fast prototyping platform is presented. The FPGA board is connected to the host computer through a PCI interface. The application system software running within Microsoft Windows environment is developed so that all the data generated during simulation can be downloaded and displayed on the host computer. Hence, the system acts like a logic analyzer with very large storage memory. Furthermore, the software provides interfaces and drivers for devices such as USB camera, computer monitor and PC soundcard so that the simulation data can be demonstrated over the host computer in real time. Because multimedia data is usually complicated and the size is huge, design and thorough verification are usually difficult and take lots of time. The proposed system is both versatile and convenient to use and verification of designs for multimedia applications becomes much easier. An MPEG-4 simple profile video encoder and a 3D surround sound processor are realized with the proposed system. Both cases can run in real time.