High-Level Synthesis of a MPEG-4 Decoder Using SystemC

Gomu Miyashita

AbstractThis report presents a simulation model of a hardware MPEG-4 Simple@L0 compliant video decoder for behavioral synthesis. The report deals with the subset of the MPEG-4 standard that deals with low-bitrate coding of rectangular natural video. An open source project, known as XviD, serves as the basis for this project. XviD is a software implementation of a MPEG-4 compliant video CODEC (Coder and Decoder) written in C. Modeling was done using the SystemC hardware description language, and according to the rules for behavioral modeling, described in the Synopsys documentation. Synopsys synthesis tools enable behavioral synthesis and implementation. These tools were used to synthesize part of the model. A full synthesis of the model has not been performed. A major part of this project was to rewrite the XviD software CODEC to a synthesizable behavioral model in SystemC. This process involved separating the decoder from the encoder parts, replacing non-synthesizable programming structures with synthesizable alternatives, and designing an architecture that promote parallel processing. A lot of effort was put into reducing on chip memory requirements. The results of these findings will be presented with a discussion on the use of SystemC as a modeling language for behavioral synthesis. Test results will be presented with estimation of internal band width requirements. Finally some ideas are proposed on future work of the decoder.
KeywordsBehavioral modeling, SystemC, MPEG-4 decoding, behavioral synthesis, digital video
TypeMaster's thesis [Academic thesis]
Year2003
PublisherInformatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
SeriesIMM-Thesis-2003-64
NoteSupervisor: Hans Holten-Lund
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Computer Science & Engineering