Design of a processor optimized for syntax parsing in video decoders

Heterogeneous platforms aim to offer both performance and flexibility by providing designers processors and programmable logical units on a single platform. Processors implemented on these platforms are usually soft-cores (e.g. Altera NIOS) or ASIC (e.g. ARM Cortex-A8). However, these processors still face limitations in terms of performance compared to full hardware designs in particular for real-time video decoding applications. We present in this paper an innovative approach to improve performance using both a processor optimized for the syntax parsing (an Application-Specific Instruction-set Processor) and a FPGA. The case study has been synthesized on a Xilinx FPGA at a frequency of 100 MHz and we estimate the performance that could be obtained with an ASIC.