Abstract
This paper presents the SONIC reconfigurable computing architecture and the first implementation, SONIC-1. SONIC is designed to support the software plug-in methodology to accelerate video image processing applications. SONIC differs from other architectures through the use of plug-in Processing Elements (PIPEs) and the Application Programmer’s Interface (API). Each PIPE contains a reconfigurable processor, a scaleable router that also formats video data, and a frame-buffer memory. The SONIC architecture integrates multiple PIPEs together using a specialised bus structure that enables flexible and optimal pipelined processing. SONIC-1 communicates with the host PC through the PCI bus and has 8 PIPEs. We have developed an easy to use API that allows SONIC-1 to be used by multiple applications simultaneously. Preliminary results show that a 19 tap separable 2-D FIR filter implemented on a single PIPE achieves processing rates of more than 15 frames per second operating on 512 x 512 video transferred over the PCI bus. We estimate that using all 8 PIPEs, we could obtain real-time processing rates for complex operations such as image warping.
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Haynes, S.D., Cheung, P.Y.K., Luk, W., Stone, J. (1999). SONIC – A Plug-In Architecture for Video Processing. In: Lysaght, P., Irvine, J., Hartenstein, R. (eds) Field Programmable Logic and Applications. FPL 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1673. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-48302-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-48302-1_3
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