Design And Development Of An Embedded Multimedia System Based ARM Processor And Linux OS

Multimedia maks our life more wonderful. Newspapers, photos, CDs, TV and Movie are integrated by Personal Computer perfectly, and internet makes it possible to exchange multimedia resource for each other. Here coms the Post-PC Era, after Network Era, Information Era, Multimedia Era. We need a new generation of multimedia player, which is more portable, more powerful, and more user-friendly. The system in this article is desined for this require.The embedded multimedia system not only has the fundamental function, music, vedio, image, ebook, but also has more additional function to meet the different market like recorder (music and vedio), camera, radio, GPS, electronic game, mobile televition. In this article, we developed an embedded multimedia system which has only the fundamental function. It is powered by Samsung ARM processor S3C2410 and running Linux operating system (OS).In this article, we analyze this embedded multimedia system from three levels: hardware, firmware, software. The hardware development part was separated into processor and surrounding devices. The firmware development part includes bootloader vivi, porting of Linux kernel, Cramfs root filesystem and Linux device drivers. In the software development part, we discuss Linux application programme, emphasis graphical user interface (GUI) development based MiniGUI. At last, we analyze merit and demerit of this system, compare single processor solution with multiprocessor, and look forward to developmental direction of the embedded multimedia system.