A Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Architecture for Flexible Media Processing

0740-7475/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE July–August 2002 NEW MEDIA APPLICATIONS such as highdefinition digital television, set-top boxes with time-shift functionality, 3D games, video conferencing, and MPEG-4 interactivity have generated a demand for increasingly flexible consumer electronics products. These products are evolving into multifunctional devices that combine a set of media applications. The required set of applications and their format vary per product, per country, and over time as standards evolve. Managing the complexity, design cost, and time to market of these programmable, resource-constrained appliances requires a generic, scalable media-processing platform that is deployable in a wide range of products. Several vendors are entering the market with platforms that address this need to some extent.1,2 Philips Electronics has developed a platform concept embodied in the Viper system on a chip.1 Such SoCs typically consist of a heterogeneous mix of fully programmable processors (such as the MIPS, ARM, and TriMedia processors) and coarse-grained applicationspecific subsystems (such as MPEG decoders and video filters) optimized for high performance with minimal power consumption and silicon area. Currently, these subsystems are dedicated to a single application, and the hardware cannot be reused for other applications within the same domain. Therefore, although the generic platform with its interconnect structure can be reused over various generations, a change in application requirements necessitates a redesign of the application-specific subsystems. These subsystems incur a large part of the total design effort and silicon cost. Eclipse is an architecture template for the design of versatile media-processing SoC subsystems. A template is a generic architecture blueprint from which designers can create different hardware instances by fixing design parameters such as number and type of coprocessors, bus widths, and memory sizes. Instances of the Eclipse template are heterogeneous subsystems containing a mix of programmable and hardwired functions. The A Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Architecture for Flexible Media Processing