The TVP project - Introduction and application requirements

In the consumer electronics area, the display technologies used for television and computers are gradually merging, as a result of emerging features such as Internet access, electronic program guides, electronic shopping, help wizards, games and video conferencing. Consequently, provision of video processing for displaying high-quality television applications clearly need to envision the consumption of multiple simultaneous information channels, as opposed to the watching of a conventional single-channel broadcast. A key feature of a TV set that supports multiple information channels is that two (or more) signals together with graphical information can be monitored in real time on its display together with graphical information. An additional desirable feature of such a TV set is that the installed signal processing power can be reallocated as required to process the various signals to be displayed. This flexibility can be used for improving overall picture quality, because signal enhancement can be preferentially applied to the signals that need it more. The system requirements for a new display processing architecture are influenced by the following trends in TV set design and computer systems: • with the introduction of digital TV and digital image enhancement techniques, TV is becoming very diverse in terms of features, requiring a flexible and reconfigurable system, • TV is influenced by PC technology with respect to computing techniques, SW architectures and applications, • since memory devices continuously become larger and cheaper, it is desirable to have one shared uniform background memory. • new features stemming from standards created by international bodies have to be realized quickly and therefore require an extensible and scalable system. Parts of the necessary signal processing are frozen, whereas in other parts programmability is allowed or even exploited intensively, • new features in a TV set call for cost-effective implementation, since it is a highly competitive market. Several proposals for TV architectures have been developed,[1],[2] but the described architectures lack the flexibility and programmability to satisfy the aforementioned requirements. This paper is divided as follows. Section 2 gives the computational requirements of typical TV functions. Section 3 describes a typical TV application in terms of a signal flow graph model of the architecture. Section 4 further elaborates on the topic of Section 3 in terms of costs and memory requirements.