Dias, TiagoRoma, NunoSousa, Leonel2020-10-272020-10-272011-01-31DIAS, Tiago; ROMA, Nuno; SOUSA, Leonel – Hardware/software co-design of H.264/AVC encoders for multi-core embedded systems. In 2010 Conference on Design and Architectures for Signal and Image Processing (DASIP). Edinburgh, UK: IEEE, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4244-8735-6. Pp. 242-249978-1-4244-8735-6978-1-4244-8734-9978-1-4244-8733-2http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/12300This paper presents a multi-core H.264/AVC encoder suitable for implementations in small and medium complexity embedded systems. The proposed structure results from an efficient hardware/software co-design methodology, where the encoder software application is highly optimized and structured in a very modular and efficient manner, so as to allow its most complex and time consuming operations to be offloaded to dedicated hardware accelerators. The considered methodology adopts a simple and efficient core interconnection mechanism to easily allow the inclusion and the removal of such optimized processing cores. Experimental results obtained with the implementation in a Virtex4 FPGA of an H.264/AVC encoder using an ASIP IP core as a ME hardware accelerator have proven the advantages of this methodology. For the considered system, speedup factors greater than 15 were obtained with a very modest increase of the involved hardware resources.engHardware/software co-designMulticoreEmbedded systemsVideo codingH.264/AVCconference object10.1109/DASIP.2010.5706271