The D30V/MPEG multimedia processor

MPEG-2 decoding and encoding are important applications for multimedia systems. Real-time capability and low-cost implementation are the main design considerations for these systems. Due to the high computational requirements of real-time applications, multimedia systems typically use special-purpose processors to handle data. However, due to the inherent inflexibility of their designs, these dedicated processors are of little use in various application environments-digital videocassette recorders, for example. This article introduces Mitsubishi's D30V/MPEG multimedia processor, which integrates a dual-issue RISC with minimal hardware support for a real-time MPEG-2 decoder. This approach is advantageous because of the small chip area it requires and the flexibility of the easy-to-program RISC processor for multimedia applications.