USHA: unified software and hardware architecture for video decoding

Video decoders used in emerging applications need to be flexible to handle a large variety of video formats and deliver scalable performance to handle wide variations in workloads. In this paper we propose a unified software and hardware architecture for video decoding to achieve scalable performance with flexibility. The light weight processor tiles and the reconfigurable hardware tiles in our architecture enable software and hardware implementations to co-exist, while a programmable interconnect enables dynamic interconnection of the tiles. Our process network oriented compilation flow achieves realization agnostic application partitioning and enables seamless migration across uniprocessor, multi-processor, semi hardware and full hardware implementations of a video decoder. An application quality of service aware scheduler monitors and controls the operation of the entire system. We prove the concept through a prototype of the architecture on an off-the-shelf FPGA. The FPGA prototype shows a scaling in performance from QCIF to 1080p resolutions in four discrete steps. We also demonstrate that the reconfiguration time is short enough to allow migration from one configuration to the other without any frame loss.

Evaluating FuncSION: A software for automated synthesis of design solutions for stimulating ideation during mechanical conceptual design

The goal of the work reported in this paper is to use automated, combinatorial synthesis to generate alternative solutions to be used as stimuli by designers for ideation. FuncSION, a computational synthesis tool that can automatically synthesize solution concepts for mechanical devices by combining building blocks from a library, is used for this purpose. The objectives of FuncSION are to help generate a variety of functional requirements for a given problem and a variety of concepts to fulfill these functions. A distinctive feature of FuncSION is its focus on automated generation of spatial configurations, an aspect rarely addressed by other computational synthesis programs. This paper provides an overview of FuncSION in terms of representation of design problems, representation of building blocks, and rules with which building blocks are combined to generate concepts at three levels of abstraction: topological, spatial, and physical. The paper then provides a detailed account of evaluating FuncSION for its effectiveness in providing stimuli for enhanced ideation.