Project Description
The project of the CE654 Embedded Systems graduate course involves the design and implementation of an
AVS video decoder on an FPGA system on chip. In the course of the project, the students
- will profile and analyze a pure software implementation of the AVS decoder on an X86 desktop
- will perform software optimizations to facilitate the porting of the software code to
an embedded system with memory and real-time limitations
- will port the optimized code to the scalar processor of the FPGA, and will profile again to
determine the perfomance bottlenecks
- will determine which portions of the decoder will be implemented in hardware to improve the decoding
speed, and which will be left to execute on the scalar processor
- will develop the architectural design of the new system, which will include the scalar processor,
coprocessors, memory controllers, and peripherals
- will implement the hardware accelerators in synthesizable HDL and will implement the system on an FPGA
(placement and routing)
- (optionally) will implement these accelerators using a C to gates tool and will compare the manual and
automatic implemetations in terms of performance
- will integrate the hardware accelerators to the processor and will develop the SW drivers to enable
communication between the processor, the coprocessors and the peripherals.
- will verify the functionality of the system running video decoding at real time.
- will run the AVS demo on a long input bitstream and will display the video on an LCD peripheral
- (optionally) as an optimization, they will partition the SW code to be executed in a dual core system
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