National Semiconductor Corporation

Hemant Bheda

Partha Srinivasan

Ygal Arbel

Sanjay Gongalore

A novel method and apparatus for decoding a compressed audio/video signal to produce decoded audio and decoded video signals. The decoding tasks are partitioned into 'pre-processing tasks' and 'post-processing tasks.' Pre-processing tasks involve one or more non-signal processing oriented operations which do not require extensive computing resources. Pre-processing tasks are assigned to be executed by the host processor, which can perform these tasks without straining it computational resources. Pre-processing tasks include demultiplexing the compressed audio/video stream into compressed audio and compressed video streams, performing audio pre-processing on the compressed audio stream and performing video pre-processing on the compressed video stream. Post-processing tasks involve one or more signal processing oriented operations which require extensive computing resources. Pre-processing tasks are assigned to be executed by a dedicated subprocessor. Post-processing tasks include audio post-processing and video post-processing. In an embodiment, video frame tasks are also performed as part of video post-processing. Post-processing performed by the dedicated subprocessor outputs a decoded audio signal and a decoded video signal.

Audio/video subprocessor method and structure

A novel apparatus and method is disclosed to decode an encoded MPEG video stream in an efficient manner making optimal use of available system memory and computational resources. The present invention partitions the MPEG video decode task into software tasks which are executed by a CPU and hardware tasks which are implemented in dedicated video hardware. Software tasks represent those tasks which do not require extensive memory or computational resources. On the other hand, tasks implemented in dedicated video hardware represent those tasks which involve computational and memory mintensive operations. Synchronization between software tasks executed by the CPU and hardware tasks implemented in dedicated video hardware is achieved by means of various data structures, control structures and device drivers.

Apparatus and method for MPEG video decompression

A novel method and structure for the implementation of Half Pixel Filtering and Block Averaging that are efficient for implementation on a general purpose CPU. The number of required operations are reduced by operating on multiple pixels simultaneously using sliced arithmetic, while maintaining full accuracy. In certain embodiments, the number of operations are further reduced by compromising full accuracy. This approximation is applicable to decoding of bi-directional frames.

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Cupertino, CA, United States of America

Hemant Bheda