Towards Fully Reconfigurable Multimedia Platforms*

This paper describes a novel approach to implement multimedia access platforms: reconfigurable oriented co-design. Nowadays we observe a rapid and mutant evolution of multimedia standards and its de facto adoption into many consumer electronics, such as audio/video appliances, digital set-top boxes for TV access networks, mobile technologies and portable digital assistants (PDAs). Among the disadvantages of current multimedia access platforms, we can mention the relative high cost, the very short obsolescence cycles, the communication and computational performance limitations, the large sizes of software components, and system architectures that do not match future multimedia standards requirements. To overcome these, we propose the use of a reconfigurable computing architecture to implement a family of multimedia access platforms. As an example, we present an implementation of a multimedia access platform that runs a web browser (HTML 3.2 compatible) over a 32-bit RISC microprocessor, described using less than 256 Kbytes of data to represent software and hardware components on a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)