Design and Implementation of an ALU Cluster Intellectual Property as a Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerator for Media Streaming Architecture

• Main Authors: Shao-Hsuan Chang, 張紹宣
• Other Authors: 闕河鳴
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/66721172009467596171

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 電信工程系所 === 94 === There are more and more portable systems such as mobiles, MP3 player, PDA, and other entertainment systems in today’s life. The functionality and complexity of them thus increase much higher than old-time ones. Therefore, having a great deal ability of multimedia operation is important for portable systems. However, it is tough to have enough amounts of multimedia operations from conventional hardware architecture. This results from the poor match between conventional architecture and features of media applications. It hence leads to inefficient memory access that induces performance degression. The worst case is unable to meet the real time requirement. According, this thesis designs an operational unit, ALU cluster, that is referenced from Stanford’s stream processor architecture and thus matches to media applications to provide necessary processing requirements for media applications. Besides, considering the issues of convenient usage in the future and rapid integration of real multimedia applications, we wrap ALU cluster as an AMBA-compatible IP by adding designed interface. Then, it is possible to exploit other existing IP and peripherals in the AMBA platform and truly treats our design as hardware accelerator for real multimedia applications. This thesis is finished with a synthesizable soft IP. The designed interface is verified by ARM-series baseboard. This ensures that the interface conforms to AMBA specification.