Improving "performance vs silicon size" tradeoffs using coprocessors: A case study: G.721 on OAK and Pine DSP Cores

The increase in performance and internal memory of current DSP cores allows most applications to have software only implementations. However, recent applications in telecommunications (e.g. MPEG-4) require more and more computational power. A solution to this problem is to implement a subset of the algorithm in hardware. In this paper we present a software only and a mixed hardware/software solution for the G.721 [1] Adaptative Differential Pulse Code Modulation (AD-PCM) on VLSI Technology VVF3000 and VVF3500 DSP cores which stand for DSP Group PineDSPCore and OakDSPCore™ [2]. We will show the benefits of a coprocessor based solution and describe our methodology to extract hardware blocks from a software implementation.