Introduction

With the growing demand for high quality multimedia, especially over portable media, there has been continuous development on more sophisticated algorithms for audio, video, and graphics processing. These algorithms have the characteristics of data-intensive computation of high complexity. For such applications, we can consider two extreme approaches to implementation: software running on a general purpose processor and hardware in the form of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). In the case of general purpose processor, it is flexible enough to support various applications but may not provide sufficient performance to cope with the complexity of the applications. In the case of ASIC, we can optimize best in terms of power and performance but only for a specific application. With a coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA), we can take advantage of the above two approaches. This architecture has higher performance level than general purpose processor and wider applicability than ASIC.