Section: Application Domains

Set-top Boxes

Television sets and set-top-boxes are forming a symbiotic connection, which relies on common standards and protocols such as DLNA, Web standards, Web 2.0, H264, HEVC... As a result, the hardware platform on which applications run is becoming less important: commonly used ISAs like x86 are not mandatory any more. Dedicated pieces of hardware could efficiently provide specific services according to user requests. End-users expect platforms supporting many services with maximum performance, but do not require all of them at the same time. Dynamic reconfiguration is here too a good compromise, and it is efficient enough to support high performance algorithms like H264 or HEVC. It could also provide a ground for supporting on-the-fly codec switching. This may occur because the broadcaster decides to change the encoding of its video signal for safety reasons. Nowadays this operation is performed by a software because changing a hard codec still means flashing the set-top boxes to update it. Dreampal has started a collaboration with Kalray (http://www.kalray.eu ) to develop a massively parallel language (without dynamic reconfiguration facilities, for now) on their MPSoC. H264 will be tested on this chip and on special FPGA boards with dedicated extensions for multimedia applications like the Xilinx Zynq.