Abstract:
Multimedia represents the dominant application in many embedded systems ranging from set-top boxes to mobile phones and PDAs. Most of these systems are being designed using generic multiprocessor platforms rather than starting from scratch. Such design platforms are dif ficult to optimize but, being primarily targeted to a particular application domain, of fer the promise of flexibility , low costs and time-to-market advantages. Consequently , significant research ef forts are currently directed towards narrowing down the performance gap between these platform-based designs and the fully customized solutions based on traditional ASIC implementations. This talk will bring a communication-centric perspective to this emerging research area and emphasize some research issues where the concept of "network" is at the forefront of embedded multimedia processing. W e hope to impart the essence of the theoretical foundations, design implications and appropriate design methods for using the network paradigm to solve real problems in multimedia. T o this end , we discuss several performance models and optimization techniques that can be used to quantitatively analyze dif ferent architectures, while reasoning about performance, energy , QoS requirements and media quality tradeof fs.

Radu Marculescu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University . He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1998. His current research focuses on developing design methodologies and software tools for system-on-chip design, on-chip communication, and ambient intelligence.
Radu Marculescu received the NSF CAREER A ward in 2001 in the area of design automation of electronic systems. He won the 2005 T ransactions on V ery Large Scale Integration Systems (T -VLSI) Best Paper A ward from the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society , and several Best Paper A wards from the Design Automation and T est in Europe (DA TE) Conference and Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) in 2001 and 2003. He was also awarded the Carnegie Institute of T echnology’ s Ladd Research A ward in 2002. Dr . Marculescu is a co-founder of the IEEE workshop on Embedded Systems for Real-T ime Multimedia (ESTIMedia) and served as its General Chair in 2005.