Trimedia Chip As The Core Embedded System Design And Its Applications In Video Processing

With the development of video and multimedia application, many kinds of video and multimedia processing devices have appeared. General speaking, these devices are designed for a special application and their hardware and software both are not reusable. So we have to design individual software/hardware for each device. From the view of developing cost and speed, using one hardware to implement all kinds of applications is most efficient - the only thing we should do to implement different application is changing software. Philips' TriMedia can satisfy the requirement. TriMedia is a kind of DSP that is specialized in multimedia applications. The manufacture of the DSP, Philips, integrated many hardware modules specialized in multimedia applications and a PCI interface circuit in the chip. Moreover, Philips also provided many software tools for convenience to the system designers.This article discussed a embedded system design based on TriMedia chip. The system communicates with the Host computer through PCI bus, and downloads program to itself from the Host computer. In applications, simple single task can run without operation system; on the other hand, complex multi-task program should run with real time operation system pSOS to ensure the synchronization of tasks and the real time feature. The embedded system based on TriMedia chip can implement many applications by using different software, that is just the flexibility of the system. In this article, we mainly discussed its applications on video capture, controllable delay line and MPEG-2 decoder.