......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... BROADCOM MEDIADSP: A PLATFORM FOR BUILDING PROGRAMMABLE MULTICORE VIDEO PROCESSORS ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... BROADCOM’S MEDIADSP TECHNOLOGY IS A MODULAR AND SCALABLE MULTIPROCESSOR PLATFORM THAT PROVIDES THE FRAMEWORK FOR BUILDING CUSTOMIZED AND PRO- GRAMMABLE MULTICORE PROCESSORS FOR THE VIDEO AND IMAGE PROCESSING DOMAIN. THE MEDIADSP PLATFORM EXPLOITS TASK-LEVEL PARALLELISM AND INCLUDES ARCHI- TECTURAL ELEMENTS THAT SUPPORT A TASK-BASED PROGRAMMING MODEL.BROADCOM’S BCM35421 PROCESSOR LEVERAGES MEDIADSP TECHNOLOGY TO REALIZE A SINGLE-CHIP, FULL HIGH DEFINITION (FHD) FRAME RATE CONVERTER FOR TODAY’S 120 HZ LCD TV SETS. ......Designers of digital circuitry for real-time processing of video data in con- sumer electronics applications face the conflicting requirements of high computa- tional capability and low hardware cost. To address these requirements, many commer- cial chips for consumer video processing use fixed-function logic designed to perform a set of specific tasks (for example, video decoding, scaling, and noise reduction). However, several factors motivate the devel- opment of a more flexible approach:  Some applications must support many video-coding standards, including some that are in a state of flux.  Several important video-processing problems are ill posed, admitting no ul- timate solution.  Certain product requirements have di- verse mutually exclusive use cases.  New business opportunities must be addressed without the cost and time of developing a new chip. Real-time video processing involves pro- ducing data at high rates—from 27 MHz for standard-definition TV up to 450 MHz for full high-definition TV. Depending on algorithm complexity, the required processing rates can exceed 100 billion operations per second. A programmable approach should therefore be scalable to very high performance levels. The mediaDSP technology is a scalable platform for rapid development of cost- effective solutions to a variety of video- processing problems. The platform uses a heterogeneous multicore approach, with a task-based programming model and a uni- form approach for managing tasks executing on different types of programmable and Richard Selvaggi Larry Pearlstein Broadcom .............................................................. 30 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1732/09/$25.00  c 2009 IEEE