Versatile PC/FPGA Based Verification/Fast Prototyping Platform with Application to H.264/AVC I-frame Encoder
林宜豊 · 2004
SOC design for multimedia applications becomes important these years. Before a chip is taped out, thorough verification on a FPGA based system is usually required. Most people tend to build a dedicated FPGA based evaluation board for a particular application or ASIC (Application Specific IC). The effort to build such a system is no less than that of designing the chip. Furthermore, the verification of the system relies on tools such as logic analyzers which have quite a few limitations and are rather inconvenient to use. A versatile verification/fast prototyping platform consisting of a FPGA board and the associated system software is presented. The FPGA board is connected to the host computer through a PCI interface. The system software running within Microsoft Windows environment is developed so that all real-time data generated during simulation can be downloaded and displayed on the host computer. Particularly for multimedia applications, all processed data can be viewed or heard on the fly. User can take advantage of resources of computer to generate or gather test vectors for circuits. In addition, huge volumes of verification result can be stored in the computer for advanced comparison. Finally, we implemented a H.264/AVC I-Frame Encoder. H.264/AVC is quite a new video coding standard. Its compression efficiencies and qualities are better than others, including MPEG4. It is also proven that H.264/AVC I-Frame is better than JEPG and JPEG2000. Our H.264/AVC I-Frame Encoder System includes hardware and software. The system is co-verified in the proposed platform.