This article is part of the series Embedded Digital Signal Processing Systems.

Open Access Research Article

Implementing a WLAN Video Terminal Using UML and Fully Automated Design Flow

Petri Kukkala1*, Mikko Setälä2, Tero Arpinen2, Erno Salminen2, Marko Hännikäinen2 and TimoD D Hämäläinen2

Author Affiliations

1 Nokia Technology Platforms, Visiokatu 6, Tampere 33720, Finland

2 Institute of Digital and Computer Systems, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 1, Tampere 33720, Finland

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EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems 2007, 2007:085029 doi:10.1155/2007/85029


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jes.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/085029


Received:28 July 2006
Revisions received:12 December 2006
Accepted:10 January 2007
Published:15 March 2007

© 2007 Kukkala et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This case study presents UML-based design and implementation of a wireless video terminal on a multiprocessor system-on-chip (SoC). The terminal comprises video encoder and WLAN communications subsystems. In this paper, we present the UML models used in designing the functionality of the subsystems as well as the architecture of the terminal hardware. We use the Koski design flow and tools for fully automated implementation of the terminal on FPGA. Measurements were performed to evaluate the performance of the FPGA implementation. Currently, fully software encoder achieves the frame rate of 3.0 fps with three 50 MHz processors, which is one half of a reference C implementation. Thus, using UML and design automation reduces the performance, but we argue that this is highly accepted as we gain significant improvement in design efficiency and flexibility. The experiments with the UML-based design flow proved its suitability and competence in designing complex embedded multimedia terminals.

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