SoC platform based design of MPEG-2/4 AAC audio decoder

This paper presents an SoC platform based design for the implementation of an AAC audio decoder. We present the approach not only for the characteristics of the algorithm, but also provide the numerical decision for evaluation of the various approaches. The overall system is first analyzed and profiled with the ARM profiler. Then the decoder system is partitioned into software part and hardware part respectively based on the property of analysis. The software part is developed for the implementation of intensive decision making operations needed for audio bitstreams. The hardware part is a dedicated hardware for the regular and computation intensive operations in AAC audio decoding. The decoder system is realized on the ARM integrator platform where the hardware and software is communicated efficiently with the AMBA architecture.