Designing Embedded Linux Multi-Core System For Multimedia Decoding With ESL Tools

As the core of multi-media applications are widely used in a variety of devices, multi-format multimedia CODECS in the field of hand-held is an important problem. The traditional practice is using ASIC, RISC and DSP for multimedia CODECS. These systems can achieve single or multiple codec support, but at it was very difficult for them to support format varieties, scalability and rapid market. Linux is an open source operating system, widely used in scientific computation, database services, and personal workstations. With the development in the field of semiconductor, chip running in fast clock, now,Linux is success embedded into the field of industrial control, consumer electronics and play an important role. At the same time, there are some open-source software player on Linux, e.g. Mplayer, Gstream and VideoLan. MPlayer supports almost all current mainstream multi-media formats.In this paper, we combine the ARM11 MPCore, SMP Linux and Mplayer, through the use of ARM ESL tools to simulation of Linux-based multi-media system in multi-code. As opposed to complex ASIC design, it will soon be able to solve the hand-held Multimedia problems. Using ARM ESL, we profile the whole system including both software and hardware. Then through the process of hardware and software co-design, we obtain the partitions and the architecture of the whole system. In addition, we optimize hardware and software co-operation in system level to achieve the final real-time system which is able to decode multimedia streams in different formats.