Question

What are the recent trends and challenges in the field of multimedia?

Answer 1

A lot of progress has been made in multimedia systems from both applications and system-design perspective. The designers have a lot more resources at their disposal – more transistors to play with, better and almost completely automated tools to place and route these transistors, and much more memory in the system. However, a number of key challenges exist. With increasing number of transistors has come increased power to worry about. While the tools for the back-end (synthesizing a chip from the detailed system description) are almost completely automated, the front-end (developing a detailed specification of the system) of the design-process is still largely manual, leading to increased design time and error.