A modular VLIW Processor

Recent FPGA chips, with their large capacity memory and reconfigurability potential, have opened new ways for rapid prototyping of embedded systems. With the advent of high density FPGAs it is now feasible to implement a high-performance VLIW processor core in an FPGA. In this paper, we describe research results of enabling the DSP TMS320 C6201 model for real-time image processing application, by exploiting FPGA technology. The goals are, firstly, to keep the flexibility of DSP in order to shorten the development cycle, and secondly to use powerful available resources on FPGA to increase real-time performance. We present a modular DSP C6201 VHDL model which contains the hardware just necessary for each target application. The application development cycle proposed is validated with some common algorithms of image. Our results demonstrate that an algorithm can easily be, in an optimal manner, specified and then automatically converted to VHDL language and implemented on an FPGA device with system level software.