Research using Tensilica's Technology

Design fast and low power video transcoding algorithms and architecture using Tensilica Platform.

Video codecs have become pervasive in our day to day life and are used for a variety of tasks ranging from providing entertainment to monitoring scenes and so on. During these years, the video information has been compressed and coded to various formats for transmitting, storage, playing, etc. The most popular video formats, such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, have their merits and application fields already entirely. Thus, the various video standards will coexist a long period. Video transcoding which provide video signal conversions between different bit rate, frame rate, spatial resolution, and coding syntax, will become more and more useful. So far, most the being used transcoding tools implement the operation using software tools. The key problem is the operation time is always too long to deal with. And, for the complexity of the transcoding algorithm, the hardware implementation is in short supply, especially low-power and high-speed ones.

Therefore, developing a better transcoder poses great challenges for designers. Finding out new system architecture and/or algorithms are the keystone to achieve improvements. Tensilica's Xtensa processor may provide us a platform to explore different design techniques or partitioning schemes between software and hardware, as well as an early step comparison between different techniques. And, it's instruction-level implementation may provide a cheaper and faster solution comparing to RTL-level or hardware-level implementation

Outline of Curriculum and Courses

• Structured Integrated Circuits design
• Design and Practice of MOS Integrated Circuits
• Digital Audio and Video Signal Processing
• Simulation of Communication Systems and Design of Communication System-on-Chip

Student/Assistants Outreach

• 10 students per year will use Tensilica's tools.
• 2 doctoral candidates in grade two
• 3 doctoral candidates in grade one
• 4-6 master candidates in grade one or two

Tsinghua University's URL link

Tsinghua University EE Department's URL link

Tsinghua University EE Department's News URL Link