On the way to an H.264 HW/SW reference model: a SystemC modeling strategy to integrate selected IP-blocks with the H.264 software reference model

SystemC is a new hardware design concept that enables the designer to perform early functional verification of developed hardware blocks by facilitating their integration with software in a unified platform. It provides hardware-oriented constructs within the context of C++ as a class library implemented in standard C++. In this paper, we propose a strategy that enables us to emulate a model of a full HW/SW H.264 encoder. The latest reference software is modified by allowing selected computationally extensive modules to be optionally executed in emulated hardware. SystemC is used for hardware modeling. The proposed strategy enables us to perform early functional verification and conformance analysis of the IP-blocks at the system level of abstraction.