Why Are You Reading This Book?

Well, assuming that you find your pleasure reading elsewhere, we hope you're reading this book for at least one of the following reasons:

• You'd like to understand more about what embedded media processing entails, and what demands it places on designers who are more familiar with conventional systems based on microcontrollers (MCUs) or digital signal processors (DSPs).

• You need to design an embedded multimedia system and want to know how to choose the proper processor for the application.

• You've already chosen a processor, and you want to know how to start archi-tecting your system so that you can avoid problems at the outset.

• You're in the middle of designing a multimedia system, but you've run into some snags with trying to get all of your data flows and memory accesses to line up properly.

• You're related to one of the authors.

In this book we concern ourselves with embedded media processing(EMP) systems that is, applications involving large data blocks (whether image, video, audio, speech, or some combination of these), a need for signal processing, and (often) a real-time nature. By "embedded," we mean a specialized processor that's part of a larger system and is targeted for a specific application (as opposed to a personal computer, which is intended to do some of everything). A further requirement of many EMP systems is portability, so battery life is a key factor, and it's often necessary to reach a compromise between power dissipation and computational performance.

So...