SoftSONIC: A Customisable Modular Platform for Video Applications

This paper presents the Customisable Modular Platform (CMP) approach. The aim is to accelerate FPGA application developraising the level of abstraction and facilitating design reuse. The solution is based on network of Nodes, communicating using packetbased protocol. The approach is illustrated using SoftSONIC, a CMP for video applications. Our approach promotes modularity and design reuse by having multiple interoperable layers of design abstraction, while supporting advanced development and verification methods such as mixedion execution and efficient system-level simulation based on Transaction Level Modelling. The platform provides domain-specific abstractions and customisations of various elements such as communication protocols and topology, enabling exploitation of data locality and fineand coarse-grain parallelism. The benefits of our approach is demonstrated using SoftSONIC for development of several real-time HDTV video processing applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FPL
• Authors: Tero Rissa, Peter Y. K. Cheung, Wayne Luk
• Keywords: Approach Promotes Modularity, Customisable Modular Platform, Design Reuse, FPL 2004