always_comm: An FPGA-based Hardware Accelerator for Audio/Video Compression and Transmission

Abstract: We present a design for an extensible video conferencing stack implemented entirely in hardware on a Nexys4 DDR FPGA, which uses the M-JPEG codec to compress video and a UDP networking stack to communicate between the FPGA and the receiving computer. This networking stack accepts real-time updates from both the video codec and the audio controller, which means that video will be able to be streamed at 30 FPS from the FPGA to a computer. On the computer side, a Python script reads the Ethernet packets and decodes the packets into the video and the audio for real time playback. We evaluate this architecture using both functional, simulation-driven verification in Cocotb and by synthesizing SystemVerilog RTL code using Vivado for deployment on our Nexys4 DDR FPGA, where we evaluate both end-to-end latency and throughput of video transmission.