Developing Video IP in a Fully Integrated Design Environment

Often the implementation of video processing systems requires support for various video and audio standards and involves converting signals from one standard to another. Multimedia applications require processing signals at video rates, whichmeans that simulation should run in realtime during the development process. Typical video processing systems use a microprocessor to control a video pipeline comprising a video source and sink, a large memory for storage of video data, and a video processing system (Figure 1). As you implement and debug the various video algorithms, you will need to verify the functionality through software and hardware simulation. Simulation of video processing applications creates special challenges given the real-time nature of video streams and the enormous amount of video data required per frame.

Figure 1 – Video system diagram