The Virtex II ProTM MOLEN Processor

We use the Xilinx Virtex II ProTM technology as prototyping platform to design a MOLEN polymorphic processor, a custom computing machine based on the co-processor architectural paradigm. The PowerPC embedded in the FPGA is operating as a general purpose (core) processor and the reconfigurable fabric is used as a reconfigurable co-processor. The paper focuses on hardware synthesis results and experimental performance evaluation, proving the viability of the MOLEN concept. More precisely, the MPEG-2 application is accelerated very closely to its theoretical limits by implementing SAD, DCT and IDCT as reconfigurable co-processors. For a set of popular test video sequences the MPEG-2 encoder overall speedup is in the range between 2.64 and 3.18. The speedup of the MPEG-2 decoder varies between 1.65 and 1.94.