Design and Implementation of Digital TV Widget for Android on Multi-core Platform

Abstract

With the rapid advancements in hand-held devices, traditional phone have also been developed into smart multifunctional mobile phones, which feature numerous functions and flexible operation. Such rapid advancement results from transformations of the embedded system architecture. In the mode of a multi-core cooperative work, the work requiring greater mathematical operations, such as video decoding, is assigned to a cooperative processor, which is specially designed for mathematical operations. In this way, the work load of a main processor can be reduced, and high operation loads can be realized. Based on the open source software model, Android may reduce time intervals in developing application programs, thus, hand-held manufacturers are paying increased attention to the system. Android has good network support capabilities, as well as a totally open software development environment, thus, there are many completed application programs available for download and use. However, until now, there was no digital TV player in Android. When a digital TV broadcast is combined with other application programs, other services will become available while TV programs are broadcast. This paper proposes how to add the mechanism for watching digital TV programs onto the multi-core platform, Texas Instrument TMS320DM6446, which is realized through cooperative works in order to use the processors of the multi-core system with Android.