A 250-MHz single-chip multiprocessor for audio and video signal processing

A 250-MHz single-chip multiprocessor, which can implement multichannel decoding, encoding, and transcoding of various audio and video standards, was fabricated using 0.25-μm CMOS technology and consumes 2.38 W at 2.5 V. The multiprocessor integrates four processors and 64-kB shared level-2 cache and exploits coarse-grained parallelism inherent in audio and video signal processing with multithreaded programming. Three coprocessors and scratch-pad memory have been added to each processing element and perform subword parallel processing, background data transfer, and bitstream processing for audio and video signal processing. Useful-skew and clock gating have been utilized to achieve high-speed operation and low power consumption. Consequently, the multiprocessor achieves MPEG2 (MP@HL) video decoding at 20 frames/s