A processing system for real-time holographic video computation.

This paper discusses the Chidi holographic video processing system (called Holo-Chidi) used for real-time computation of Computer Generated Holograms and the subsequent display of the holograms at video frame rates. Chidi is a reconfigurable multimedia processing system designed at the MIT Media Laboratory for real-time synthesis and analysis of multimedia data in general and digital video frames in particular. Holo-Chidi which is an adaptation of Chidi, comprises two main components: the sets of processor cards and the the display interface cards. Each processor card consists of a General Purpose Processor (GPP), a processor to PCI bridge, up to 128MByte DRAM, three SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and high bandwidth data transceivers, all resident on a standard PCI form-factor card. One of the FPGAs, called the RP (Reprogrammable Processor), is dynamically; reconfigurable and enables Chidi to be used as a flexible specialized hardware for use in performing computations on streams of data and for the control of the transmission of the results through a High Speed I/O interface port to the display: interface cards. The GPP controls the FPGAs and reconfigures the RP as needed by an application. Data archival/retrieval capability is provided through the PCI interface via which the system can download/upload data from/to a host system while real-time input data streams can be received through a FireWire interface whence a camera may be connected. The display interface cards assemble and format data from the multiple processor cards for the display. ii nine card Chidi processor system can perform over true billion 8 bit multiplications and two billion 21 bit additions in one second. This throughput is enough to generate a 36MB hologram frame in real time and to display the frame at video rates.