Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Background
1.1
Era of Digital Convergence
Since the mid-1990s, the concept of “digital convergence” has been proposed and
discussed from both technological and business viewpoints [ 1 ] . In the twenty- fi rst
century, “digital convergence” has become stronger and stronger in various digital
fields. It is especially notable in the recent trend in digital consumer products such
as cellular phones, car information systems, and digital TVs (Fig. 1.1 ) [ 2, 3 ] . This
trend will become more widespread in various embedded systems, and it will expand
the conventional market due to the development of new functional products and also
lead to the creation of new markets for goods such as robots.
In a digitally converged product, various applications are combined and executed
on a single device. For example, several video formats such as MPEG-4 and H.264
and several audio formats such as MP3 and AAC are decoded and encoded in a cel-
lular phone. In addition, recognition and synthesis technologies have recently been
added. The latest digital TVs and DVD recorders can even extract goal-scoring
scenes from soccer matches using audio and image recognition technologies. Thus,
an embedded SoC in the “digital-convergence” product needs to execute countless
tasks such as media, recognition, information, and communication processing.
Figure 1.2 shows the required performance of various current and future digital-
convergence applications, executed at giga operations per second (GOPS) [ 2, 3 ] .
Digital convergence requires and will continue to require higher performance in
various kinds of media and recognition processes. The problem is that the improve-
ments made in the frequency of embedded CPUs, DSPs, or media processors will
not be sufficient in the future because of power consumption limits. In our estima-
tion, only applications that require performance of less than several GOPS can be
executed by a single processor at an acceptable level of power consumption of
embedded systems. We therefore need to find a solution for applications that require
higher GOPS performance. A special hardware accelerator is one solution [ 4, 5 ] .
It is suitable for processing standardized formats like MPEG videos. However, the
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