Departments of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering

EE590/BIOEN599X

Fall Quarter, 2000

Course: EE590/BIOEN599X

2) C or Assembly Language Programming

3) Signal or Image Processing

4) Permission of Course Instructor

*An entry code is required.

Credit: Five (5)

Time: 4:30 – 6:20 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays

Place: EE/CSE 403

The rapid pace of advancement in multimedia, communications, and computing technologies has been fueling the development of a wide range of applications with enormous opportunities. The impact of the new-generation technologies and systems will be profound and far-reaching. For example, in the last ten years, multimedia has gone through a dramatic transformation from highly-hyped futuristic concepts and unrealistic applications to tangible realities and powerful agents for changes in many facets of our lives: whether it is a highway traffic monitor, Web cam, or digital camcorder; whether it is a DVD player, digital TV, set-top box, HDTV, or multi-function game machine; whether it is an X-ray CT or MRI scanner, or hand-held ultrasound machine; whether it is a realistic portrayal of dinosaurs or sinking cruise ships at the movies. With continuing advances in semiconductor technology, computer architecture and image/video processing algorithms, this trend will accelerate. Programmable solutions based on the next-generation mediaprocessors will offer flexibility, shorter time-to-market, lower R&D costs, multi-function capability, and other advantages compared to the ASIC-based product development paradigm and are likely to steadily replace hardwired solutions.

This course is unique in that it takes an integrated approach, focusing on mediaprocessors, their architectures, media processing algorithms and optimal implementations of these algorithms on mediaprocessor architectures to obtain high performance. One major limiting factor to the widespread use of mediaprocessors has been the lack of programmers who can use mediaprocessors to their maximum computing potential. We will cover several leading mediaprocessors that are commercially available or under development, e.g., Media Accelerated Processor (MAP) from Hitachi and Equator Technologies, Texas Instruments TMS320C6X, Philips TriMedia, BOPS ManArray, Fujitsu FR-V, Pentium III with MMX and Streaming SIMD Extensions, and other processors.

In addition to homework and laboratory assignments, each student will work on an individual project on programming a function or application on a specific mediaprocessor. Access will be provided to the necessary development tools, e.g., compilers, assemblers, simulators, debuggers, and actual boards for software development.