Product category:
Design and Development Hardware
News Release from: Altera Europe | Subject: Video and Image kits
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 25 April 2006
Kits aid FPGA-based audio and video
development
Altera Corporation has put together a comprehensive high-performance FPGA solution for designers of video and image processing applications.
Altera Corporation has put together a comprehensive high-performance FPGA solution for designers of video and image processing applications Comprising intellectual property (IP) cores, development kits, FPGAs and reference designs, the new offering addresses the need for increased processing bandwidth in video and image processing applications as video standards continue to advance and technologies evolve
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 Jun 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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"Designers of broadcast video, video surveillance, video conferencing and medical imaging applications now have a scalable video and image processing solution for addressing their cost, performance and flexibility requirements while meeting their time to market goals", said Steve Mensor, Senior Director of IP and Technology Marketing at Altera.
"We are confident that we are offering a solution that addresses the evolving video and image processing market".
Altera's video and image processing technologies can be implemented as stand-alone FPGAs or as FPGA coprocessors supporting DSP processors.
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The Stratix IV family has up to 680K logic elements, 2x bigger than Altera's Stratix III family, which currently comprise currently the largest FPGAs on the market.
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Stratix III FPGAs are the industry's first programmable logic devices able to support Gigabit Ethernet SGMII on LVDS pins.
In high definition (HD) applications, multiple stand-alone DSP processors may be required because a single DSP processor cannot efficiently perform compression algorithms.
FPGAs also lower price-to-performance ratios by either acting as a coprocessor for the DSP processor or by replacing the DSP processor altogether.
In addition, FPGAs provide advantages over ASSPs because they can be easily upgraded to support higher resolutions and new video standards.
Altera's latest device families, including low-cost Cyclone II FPGAs, high-density, high-performance Stratix II FPGAs and HardCopy II structured ASICs, support the video and image processing solution.
Key components of the solution include: nine configurable IP cores, including a deinterlacer, scaler, 2D filtering for smoothing and sharpening images, 2D median filtering for noise removal, and a colour space convertor; a video development kit, Cyclone II Edition with two composite standard definition inputs and a Cyclone II EP2C70 device for quickly testing and evaluating low-cost designs; an audio video development kit, Stratix II GX Edition targeted for higher-end applications using the high-speed transceivers on the Stratix II GX device; and a comprehensive video reference design included in the development kits, which helps customers easily jump-start development efforts.
The video and image processing solution is available for ordering through Altera's distribution channel and sales representatives.
The Video and Image Processing IP Suite will be available in May and costs $995.
The Video Development Kit, Cyclone II Edition is priced at $1095 and the Audio Video Development Kit, Stratix II GX Edition is priced at $4995.
Both development kits will be available in July.
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