Codesign of hardware, software, and algorithms-a case study

The codesign of processor hardware, software, and algorithms for a video processor is investigated. The case study focuses on the Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT) of an MPEG-1 decoder. Variations of the IDCT algorithm on different processors are compared. The paper describes a codesign methodology that is based on automatic quantitative analysis. The automation makes complex explorations for specific application domains feasible. Performance results are presented for variations of the algorithms, for different compiler techniques, and for increasing the instruction-level parallelism of the underlying processor hardware. In particular, the synergy effect obtained from the combined effort of these different fields is investigated.