The Design Of Audio And Video Decoding Oriented SoC Platform

According to Moore's Law, the feature size of modern technology of integrated circuit is ever shrinking and the number of transistors can be integrated in single chip is growing exponentially. To reduce total cost of product, chip designer integrates almost all the components including processors, memories, special function units, and analog devices into single chip, this highly integrated IC is called system-on-chip (SoC). The complexity of SoC make the design and manufacture cost grow dramatically. Chip designers are facing with the challenge of how to design more powerful chips which are smaller in size, lower in power consumption in a shorter time. As the manufacture technology of integrated circuit progresses as Moore's law, the chip design productivity can not keep up with it. The capability difference between IC design and manufacture is called design-gap, which promotes the designers to seek better SoC design methodology. The main contents of this thesis include SoC design methodology, SoC development platforms and their multimedia applications.Design reuse and application specific design are two of the most important SoC design methodologies. SoC integrates a large number of functional units, the use of existing, proven IPs can effectively control design costs, shorter design cycle and guarantee high design quality. Design reuse covers the whole SoC design flow from the specification constitution to the final tape-out, ensuring the effective use of function IPs or verification IPs. SoC is a higher level of ASIC, which is closely related to specific application. The application specific design emphasizes the application characteristics by using rapid system prototype to exploration the design space and optimize the architecture, and by using software/hardware co-design to ensure the design convergence.The IPs in a SoC can be classed into two categories, some are application dependent components and the others are generic components. Platform based design construct a common platform using the generic components first, building the target system by adding application specific components to the predefined platform. Platform-based design is an IP reuse strategy to achieve rapid design and verification and to reduce the design uncertainty and costs. A platform usually includes processors, common peripherals and on chip interconnection. This paper describes the core components of SoC platform, including Spock DSP core, CK510 RISC processor and two high performance on-chip interconnection XRAIL multi-channel bus and XRING on chip interconnection network.Multimedia processing has become one of the most popular research area, the applications include high definition television, satellite communications and hand-held equipments and etc. This paper describes two multimedia oriented SoC platforms, Gemini and MSSoC. Gemini dual core platform is oriented to audio processing, OggVorbis decoder demo is development on the platform. MSSoC is a scalable multi-subsystem platform which using XRING and XRAIL as the on chip interconnection, it integrates multiple processing subsystem to perform the system functionality. The proposed MSSoC includes a H.264 decoder node, a video display node and control node to perform H.264 playback.