Media IC & System Lab

Media IC and System Lab was established on July 2004. It is located at Room 421, BL Building (BL-421), Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, National Taiwan University .In Media IC and System Lab, there are two Ph. D. students and thirteen Master students working in different research areas of media signal processing. The research equipments of the lab include several PCs and workstations for algorithm development and chip design, several FPGA boards for chip emulation, video capture devices, and EDA tools from famous EDA vendors, such as Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, and CoWare, for VLSI system design. Media IC Design Lab has a sister lab, DSP/IC Design Lab, which is a worldwide will-known lab in image/video codec design lead by Prof. Liang-Gee Chen. Students of these two labs cooperate in several research topics.

The director of the lab is Prof. Shao-Yi Chien. He got the Ph. D. degree from DSP/IC Design Lab, Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, National Taiwan University in 2003. After that, he jointed Quanta Research Institute, Tao Yuan Shien, Taiwan as a research staff. In 2004, he came back to National Taiwan University as an Assistant Professor on July 2004. With the experiences on video coding and processing in academy and industry, Prof. Chien's research interest is multimedia system design, especially for visual systems, where input and output subsystems play important roles and become the focus of the lab in the current stage.

As the name shows, the research direction of Media IC and System Lab includes the "IC" design and"system" design of multimedia. In the current stage, the research focuses are the input and output subsystems of multimedia systems. Recently, there are several research projects, including graphics processing unit (GPU) design, image signal processing (ISP) design, intelligent video processing, and digital TV (DTV) chipset design. Both the algorithm and hardware architecture are considered in each topic. Furthermore, some System-on-a-Chip (SoC) design methodologies will be developed and employed when designing the related chips for these topics.

The students graduated from Media IC and System Lab are expected to have several essential abilities. The Master students should be familiar with IC/SoC design flow and the mapping methodology from algorithm to hardware architecture. The Ph. D. students should be familiar with multimedia system design methodology, including system analysis and system architecture design. In addition, all the students should also know the research and problem solving methodology and have good team-work ability and working altitude.