Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering Part IV Project Report 2003 Project 57 : Multimedia Extension to a Reconfigurable Processor

Multimedia applications are demanding features for many digital systems including portable devices. Multimedia extension can be incorporated into a general-purpose processor's instruction set architecture to speed up the execution of multimedia applications. Two multimedia compression standards namely Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) are chosen to be supported in this project. The time consuming operations of the two standards such as the Discrete Cosine Transform are investigated. Contemporary multimedia extensions such as MultiMedia eXtension (MMX) from Intel are also closely examined. Based on the research findings, a new multimedia extension is designed and implemented for the Altera Nios 2.1 embedded processor. The new multimedia extension is implemented in the embedded custom logic block and synthesized as a part of the Nios arithmetic and logic unit. Four benchmarks namely Discrete Cosine Transform, median filter, repetitive pixel padding and reconstruction are developed to test the performance improvement achieved by the new multimedia extension. It is claimed that a reasonable speedup of 1.3 to 4.2 for each benchmark is achieved with the multimedia extension. Some future enhancements are proposed to provide more complete multimedia extension which supports more multimedia applications and to achieve higher processor clock rate. This report is my own unaided work and was not copied from nor written in collaboration with any other person. Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Morteza Biglari-Abhari for his constant guidance and supports throughout the project. I would also like to thank my second examiner, Mr. Abbas Bigdeli for his valuable advices. Of course, many thanks to my project partner, Simon Leung, for his cooperation and helps throughout the year. And last, I would like to thank my family and all my friends. Only their unconditional supports and encouragements have made possible the success of this project.