Multimedia demonstrator on show at DAC

A portable, reconfigurable multimedia demonstrator that can run computationally intensive applications will be shown at this year's Design Automation Conference by IMEC.

A portable, reconfigurable multimedia demonstrator that can run computationally intensive applications will be shown at this year's Design Automation Conference by IMEC.

The demonstrator supports the launch of a new IMEC Industrial Affiliation Programme (IIAP) that will focus on technology for reconfigurable systems.

New developments at IMEC in reconfigurable computing are about to overcome the difficulties associated with running multimedia applications on portable devices.

Because such applications are computationally intensive and feature considerable parallelism, they cannot be implemented on general-purpose embedded processors.

What is more, they require both the flexibility of upgradeable devices (typically software-based) and a powerful computing engine (typically hardware).

The introduction of reconfigurable hardware provides low power consumption for high computation power by its hardware characteristics on the one hand, and flexibility by its reconfiguration aspects on the other hand.

IMEC's new Industrial Affiliation Programme on Reconfigurable Computing aims to develop a programming environment for reconfigurable platforms that will allow software-like programming.

A computing platform that allows different multimedia applications to run and that offers enough flexibility to download and execute future applications is targeted.

This platform needs to be powerful, flexible, energy conscious and inexpensive.

IMEC is convinced that a combination of instruction-set processors (ISP) with reconfigurable hardware is the best architecture for such a platform.

IMEC has now developed T-ReCS Gecko, a portable multimedia device based on a reconfigurable platform, that supports true hardware/software multitasking.

Gecko is able to run computationally intensive applications and currently features a video decoder and a 3D game.

Tasks of an application which is required to run at maximum quality can be spawned in hardware and a task can also be rescheduled dynamically from hardware to software or vice-versa depending on user requirements.

The Gecko demonstrator platform comprises an ISP (StrongARM SA-1110 located inside a Compaq iPAQ PDA) and a Xilinx Virtex 2 6000 FPGA connected to the iPAQ through its expansion bus.

The FPGA board is based on Picard, a flexible in-house demonstrator platform concept for wireless multimedia systems.

The demonstrator also features a soft interconnect packet-switched network, built on top of the FPGA, which creates a fixed interface between hardware tasks.

This allows the tasks to be created/deleted dynamically using partial reconfiguration.

Each hardware task can also communicate through this interconnect network with another hardware task or with a software task.

For the operating system (OS), IMEC has ported RTLinux 3.0 towards the StrongARM architecture.

The OS manages the applications by distributing the different tasks over the available resources.

In the longer term, IMEC is looking at a middleware layer able to distribute the tasks over the available resources in a way that provides the best overall quality-of-service to the user.

Back to top