This is an excerpt from one of the very first papers on the ‘new’ TriMedia architecture.
The authors are Selliah Rathnam and Gert Slavenburg. The article was published in IEEE Signal Processing magazine in March 1998.
Processing the New World of Interactive Media
The Trimedia VLIW CPU Architecture
Selliah Rathnam and Gert Slavenburg
Trimedia is a family of programmable multimedia processors from the Trimedia product group of Philips Semiconductors. This architecture is based upon a high-performance VLIW CPU core. TM-1000 is the first product from a family of multimedia processors based upon the Trimedia architecture. TM-1000 is designed to concurrently process video, audio, graphics and communication data.
TM1000 consists of a high performance VLIW-based CPU core, large instruction and data caches, main memory interface, and video, audio and communication-related peripherals. TM-1000 is a multimedia system on a chip. High quality video and audio applications can be implemented in TM-1000 using high-level languages such as “C” and “C++”. In this article we mainly focus on the VLIW CPU architecture.
TM-1000 Functional Overview
Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the TM-1000 chip. The bulk of a TM-1000 system consists of the TM-1000 microprocessor itself, a block of synchronous DRAM SDRAM and minimal external circuitry to interface with the incoming and outgoing multimedia data streams. TM-1000 can gluelessly interface to the standard PCI bus PC-based applications. Thus, TM-1000 can be placed directly on the PC main board or on a plug-in card.
Figure 2 shows a possible TM-1000 system application. A video-input stream, if present, might come directly from a CCIR 601-compliant digital video camera chip in YUV 4:2:2 format; the interface is glueless in this case. A nonstandard camera chip can be connected via a ‘decodecode’ chip such as the Philips SA7111. A CCIR 601 output video stream is provided directly from the TM-1000 to drive a dedicated video monitor. Stereo audio input and output require external ADC and DAC support. The operation of the video and audio interface units is highly customizable through programmable parameters.
Fig.1 TM-1000 Block Diagram
Fig.2 TM-1000 system connections. A minimal TM-1000 system requires few supporting components
A scanned copy of the full paper can be found at [1]. It is left in the condition found in the IEEE Xplore database.
[1] https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6wW18mYskvBMzM2N2M4YzAtYWEyYS00NWRjLTk5YTktYTZkYzM3OTIzMjY2
