A Hardware Implementation of Ogg Vorbis Audio Decoder with Embedded Processor

A VLSI architecture of an Ogg Vorbis decoder is proposed : which is dedicated to portable audio appliances. Referring to the computational cost analysis of the decoding processes, the LSP (Line Spectrum Pair) process, which takes more than 50% of the total processing time, can be regarded as a bottleneck to achieve realtime processing by embedded Processors. Thus in our decoder a specific hardware architecture is devised for the LSP process so as to be integrated into a single chip together with an ARM7TDMI processor. In addition, in order to reduce the total hardware cost, instead of the floating point arithmetic, the fixed point arithmetic is adopted. The LSP module has been implemented with 9,740 gates by using a Virtual Silicon 0.l5$\mu\textrm{m}$ CMOS technology, which operates at 58.8MHz with the total CPU load reduced by 57%. It is also verified that the use of the fixed point arithmetic does not incur any significant sound distortion.