Automated design flow for coarse-grained reconfigurable platforms: An RVC-CAL multi-standard decoder use-case

Specialized hardware infrastructures for efficient multi-application runtime reconfigurable platforms require to address several issues. The higher is the system complexity, the more error prone and time consuming is the entire design flow. Moreover, system configuration along with resource management and mapping are challenging, especially when runtime adaptivity is required. In order to address these issues, the Reconfigurable Video Coding Group within the MPEG group has developed the MPEG RMC standards ISO/IEC 23001-4 and 23002-4, based on the dataflow Model of Computation. In this paper, we propose an integrated design flow, leveraging on Xronos, TURNUS, and the Multi-Dataflow Composer tool, capable of automatic synthesis and mapping of reconfigurable systems. In particular, an RVC MPEG-4 SP decoder and the RVC Intra MPEG-4 SP decoder have been implemented on the same coarse-grained reconfigurable platform, targeting a Xilinx Virtex 5 330 FPGA board. Results confirmed the potentiality of the approach, capable of completely preserving the single decoders functionality and of providing, in addition, considerable power/area benefits with respect to the parallel implementation of the considered decoders on the same platform.