A Mixed-Grained Reconfigurable Computing Platform for Multiple-Standard Video Decoding (Abstract Only)

Abstract

A mixed-grained reconfigurable computing platform targeting multiple-standard video decoding is proposed in this paper. The platform integrates eight coarse-grained Reconfigurable Processing Units (RPUs), each of which consists of 16×16 multi-functional Processing Elements (PEs) and are implemented in TSMC 65 nm technology and two Altera Stratix IV EP4SE820 FPGAs. By exploiting dynamic reconfiguration of the RPUs and static reconfiguration of the FPGAs, the proposed platform achieves scalable performances and cost trade-offs to support a variety of video coding standards, including H.264, MPEG-2, AVS and HEVC. Two types of platform configuration are tested in this work. One configuration utilizes two RPUs and targets multiple-standard high-definition (HD) video decoding, while the other utilizes only one RPU, which works under a lower frequency and targets at standard resolution (SD) decoding. The HD configuration can decode 1920×1080 H.264 video streams at 30 frames per second (fps) under 200 MHz and 1920×1080 HEVC video streams at 30 fps under 236 MHz. It achieves a 25% performance gain over an industrial coarse-grained reconfigurable processor for H.264 decoding, and a 3.85× performance boosts over the Intel i5 general-purpose CPU for HEVC decoding.