EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems Cover Image
Research Article
Open Access

Implementing a WLAN Video Terminal Using UML and Fully Automated Design Flow

  • Petri Kukkala1Email author,
  • Mikko Setälä2,
  • Tero Arpinen2,
  • Erno Salminen2,
  • Marko Hännikäinen2 and
  • TimoD D Hämäläinen2
EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems20072007:085029

https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/85029

©  Kukkala et al. 2007

Received: 28 July 2006

Accepted: 10 January 2007

Published: 15 March 2007

Abstract

This case study presents UML-based design and implementation of a wireless video terminal on a multiprocessor system-on-chip (SoC). The terminal comprises video encoder and WLAN communications subsystems. In this paper, we present the UML models used in designing the functionality of the subsystems as well as the architecture of the terminal hardware. We use the Koski design flow and tools for fully automated implementation of the terminal on FPGA. Measurements were performed to evaluate the performance of the FPGA implementation. Currently, fully software encoder achieves the frame rate of 3.0 fps with three 50 MHz processors, which is one half of a reference C implementation. Thus, using UML and design automation reduces the performance, but we argue that this is highly accepted as we gain significant improvement in design efficiency and flexibility. The experiments with the UML-based design flow proved its suitability and competence in designing complex embedded multimedia terminals.

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Authors’ Affiliations

(1)
Nokia Technology Platforms
(2)
Institute of Digital and Computer Systems, Tampere University of Technology

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Copyright

© Kukkala et al. 2007

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.