A Self-Reconfigurable Multimedia Player on FPGA

With the hype of multimedia devices, many different audio and video formats have appeared in recent years. The sales of portable multimedia players like Apple's ipod have also experiment and incredible growth. These devices are usually based on general purpose microprocessors and, when a new audio or video format appears, a software upgrade is needed or, in the worst case, the new format will not be supported by the player. This work presents a novel implementation where an FPGA based multimedia player makes use of the self-reconfiguration capabilities of modern FPGA families in order to support new multimedia formats. When the player needs to play a song with a non-supported format it securely downloads the required hardware from Internet and reprograms the FPGA with the new codec