Multi-standard audio decoder with platform based SoC HW/SW co-design approach

SoC integration platform provides the flexibility of general-purpose processors and the high performance and low power consumption of custom hardware. This paper presents a multi-standard audio decoder based on the SoC HW/SW co-design approach which supports popular audio formats including AC-3, MP3 and AAC. The decoding flows are partitioned into software modules and hardware modules according to the profiling results and the operation properties. In the software part, some useful techniques are applied for optimization. In the hardware part, a hardwired accelerating unit named configurable common filterbank processor (CCFP) is proposed which can be executed at a very low operation frequency with the range of 1.3 to 3.6 MHz. Using the accelerator and the processor with cache enabled, the overall system can get more than 15x speedup compared to SW-based ARM audio decoder.