Efficient Software Development Platforms for Multimedia Applications at Different Abstraction Levels

Multimedia applications require heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures with specific I/O components in order to achieve computation and communication performances. The different processors run different software stacks made of the application code and the hardware dependent software layer. Developing this software usually makes use of a high level programming environment that does not handle specific architecture capabilities. We propose abstract software development platforms allowing to debug incrementally the different software layers and able to accurately estimate the use of the resources of the architecture. The software development platform is an abstract model of the architecture allowing to execute the software with detailed hardware-software interaction, performance measurement and software debug. Different software development platforms are generated automatically from an initial Simulink model and are used to debug the different software components and to easily experiment with several mappings of the application onto the platform resources. In this paper we apply the proposed approach on a multimedia platform, involving a high performance DSP and a RISC processor, to validate the executable code for a MJPEG decoder application.