Practical design space exploration of an H264 decoder for handheld devices using a virtual platform

Abstract

H264 is a promising standard for mobile appliances since it allows to play on the tradeoff between data transmission rates and processing needs. This tradeoff is a common issue in mobile appliance design as it leaves space for power savings. We propose here a virtual platform based global approach, i.e. investigating hardware solutions, software solutions and both, to define a set of energy-optimized degraded operating modes for a H264 decoder software. Results of this exploration show that reasonable energy savings for degraded modes can be achieved without loosing too much image quality. © 2010 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.