Low Power ARM AV Player

The Atria Logic AL-AVPLR-IPC is a compact and low power, embedded AVC (H.264) file-based AV decoder IP core, targeted for industrial and CE applications. Industrial applications include remote monitoring of manufacturing plants and digital signage for advertising and information displays in hotels, ATMs, gas pumps, kiosks, etc. CE applications include digital picture frames, SSD/HDD players, VR, and in-flight and automotive infotainment systems.

The player consists of a file reader, a de-multiplexer, an H.264 Baseline Profile HD decoder with color space converter, and an AAC-LC stereo decoder. Also included is an AV player application with build-in GUI for basic player operation, such as Play, Pause, Stop and Fast-Forward trick mode. OS support is via Ubuntu LTS. The AV player application is fully Linux GTK based, while the decoder itself is fully implemented in the Linux GStreamer open source multimedia framework.

The solution is implemented on a Xilinx Zynq 7010 FPGA with dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores and Neon DSP engines. The implementation takes full advantage of the ARM and Neon resources, leaving the programmable FPGA gates fully available for implementation of any other required circuitry. The implementation on a Xilinx Zynq 7010 FPGA addresses low power and cost-sensitive requirements.