Streaming computing platform design: DVB-T implementation on a reconfigurable architecture

In the coming streaming-application-dominant billion-transistor-chip era, there is an urgency of designing computing platforms for streaming computing application domain. Generally, a platform design process can be viewed as interplay between applications and architectures, through the bridge of mapping process. A good design is to reach a mutual optimization of the three sub-problems.; In this dissertation, a case study is first conducted on all these three sub-problems.; We choose Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) base-band receiver, including Moving Picture Experts Group-2 (MPEG-2) decoder, as an example application. Fixed-point system is designed and simulated with results conforming to the protocol requirement. The computational properties of this typical streaming multimedia application are analyzed.; The architecture under study is MorphoSys reconfigurable architecture. The shortcomings of its first generation, M1, are studied, based on which a next generation, M2, is designed to improve the memory performance and network generality, which is indispensable in efficient implementation of real applications like DVB-T. Primary synthesis is done, and area, speed, and power estimation is made. A quantitative comparison of M2 with other architectures shows its advantage in most criteria.; Mapping method is related to performance and time-to-market. In this work, many important kernels such as Viterbi, FFT, Reed-Solomon, synchronization, etc., are systematically mapped onto M2 cycle-accurately. The systematic viewpoint of mapping, affine-partitioning loop parallelizing concept, and memory hierarchy management techniques such as blocking and array contraction are studied and applied. Two programming models, SIMD model and streaming model, are found to be suitable for M2. Finally, a successful mapping estimate of the whole DVB-T base-band receiver is reached, which was the world's first single-chip software solution of DVB-T base-band receiver, to the best of our knowledge.; Besides above empirical results, a theoretical effort is also made to generalize and extend those results. An X-chart diagram is proposed to help the reasoning. Eventually, it leads to a new ScAlable HierArchical Reconfigurable Architecture (SAHARA). SAHARA is supposed to have better generality and compiler-friendliness, while these two properties are the main concerns for reconfigure architectures to be a good candidate of streaming computing platform.