A heterogeneous HW-SW architecture for hand-held multimedia terminals

One of the key issues in the design of portable multimedia systems is to find a good balance between flexibility and high processing power on one side, and area and power efficiency of the implementation on the other side. Dedicated hardware for specific functions is good in terms of power efficiency, but with the variety in signal processing functionality to be supported by a multimedia terminal, dedicated hardware for each function may result in high area cost and longer development time. Therefore, the right mix of heterogeneous hardware and software need to be found. Furthermore, a short time to market is of utmost importance for emerging application areas as directed for with (mobile) multimedia terminals. These constraints call for an architecture and design methodology which allows for reuse of a variety of processor cores together with application-specific hardware accelerators. A flexible low-power multiprocessor architecture template suitable for exploiting the inherent parallelism of the application is presented.