FPGA dynamic reconfiguration using the RVC technology: Inverse quantization case study

With the rapid evolution of technology, the latest FPGA architectures such as Virtex series of Xilinx introduced a new feature called Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR). This technique allows designer to configure a portion of the FPGA while other parts continue to run on the same FPGA. The design of an embedded system based on the DPR functionality is still complex and tedious. The MPEG consortium proposes the Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) technology. RVC provides a high level description of video decoders described as a set of interconnected Functional Units. This paper studies the use of the RVC technology for the specification of an application and the design of a system based on the DPR functionality. In this paper, we study the Inverse Quantization (IQ) algorithm of an MPEG-4 decoder and how to switch between the MPEG-2 and the H263 IQ algorithms using RVC and DPR. This simple and concrete case study highlights the DPR restrictions to take into account in MPEG RVC description in order to use the DPR.