Parallel Computing Architectures for Video-Coding and Multimedia Applications

This paper deals with parallel architectures for video-coding and multimedia applications. These applications play an important role in consumer electronics, and their pervasive use strictly depends on the cost/performance ratio that can be achieved with electronic systems. Nowadays the use of VLSI technology along with parallel computation techniques allow one to implement video-coding and multimedia dedicated systems with the necessary computing power and the low cost needed for the spread of these applications. The paper first introduces the problem of video-coding and multimedia applications, presenting also the main standards and the problems related to their support. Then different architectural solutions are presented with emphasis with the kind of parallelism they can exploit in the applications. Finally an architecture specifically developed for video-coding is presented. The architecture has been completely developed and fully tested, and it is now used as a testing prototype for checking the development of new application algorithms. The architecture has also been a means for verifying and solving all the practical problems that can be encountered when developing a real application based on a parallel architecture. In this sense the paper focuses also on implementation problems that arise in the development of a real architecture.