Implementing Codesign in Xilinx Virtex II Pro

Nowadays the real time video processing is becoming more and more critical. Thus the systems used for these purposes require powerful computation of the data in order to have short response time. Another attribute that is preferred for these systems to have, is versatility or offering the opportunity to be reconfigurable on demand. Co-design is a technique that involves both software and hardware processing, to achieve these goals. The target of this paper is to discuss the implementation of co-design in Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA with integrated PowerPC processor. The PowerPC core serves to execute the software application, while the FPGA cooperates with it. This cooperation provides a meaningful acceleration and reduces the processor load, thus making the FPGA hardware the main part of the platform. Another advantage of this technique is the opportunity to reconfigure the FPGA hardware as needed. We discuss how a real-time video processing can be run using this platform. Afterwards, the results achieved are compared with a those obtained from a software based solution only.