Flexible hardware acceleration for multimedia oriented microprocessors

The execution of multimedia applications on a microprocessor greatly benefits from hardware acceleration, both in terms of speed and energy consumption. While the basic functionality implemented in these accelerators remains constant over different product versions, small changes are still often required. With the proposed architecture and protocol, the accelerator hardware has the performance and cost benefits of a hardwired solution, while featuring all the flexibility needed in practice. From a user point of view, the entire application is still programmable.