Abstract
Due to the increasing need for testing solutions to complex hardware designs, several efforts were made in order to improve high-level synthesis (HLS) techniques. These solutions are conceived in such a way that they had to provide reasonable agreements in terms of design time, resources involved, and performance. Generally speaking, two main constraints should be satisfied for HLS applications. The first constraint consists in the ability to process complex systems at a reasonable cost, whereas the second revolves around considering some test constraints in the first tasks of the HLS flow. To fulfill these two constraints, we treated a case study using HLS for intraprediction, dequantization, and inverse transform decoding blocks of an high efficiency video coding (HEVC) decoder. For this experiment, version 10 was used of the HEVC test model (HM) reference software containing >200 functions and over 8000 lines of code. In addition, the suggested algorithm was implemented in an software/hardware (SW/HW) environment using Xilinx ZC 702-based platform. Finally, taking advantage of HLS optimization methods, the hardware design can process 6, 13, 71, and 285 video frames per second for 1600p, 1080p, 480p, and 240p video resolutions, respectively. Yet, the SW/HW designs can only decode 0.5, 1.5, 4, and 15.2 frames per second for the same video resolutions, i.e., with a gain of 3% in frame rate and 60% in power consumption compared to SW implementation.