We stopped by the Xilinx booth. The company makes FPGAs (programmable chips) and has been on our radar for a couple of years as it has been developing its business in the broadcast space. As its expertise has developed there, it has added resource to better address Pro/AV – hence its appearance at Infocomm.
First we looked at a programmable interface built on the firm’s technology by Omnitek. It converts between HDMI (up to 2.0) and DisplayPort 1.2 and SDI up to 12G SDI. At the event, HDCP V1.3 was being shown, with V2.2 in progress. Omnitek has a range of ip cores for high quality scaling, rotation, colourspace and resolution conversion, etc. Customers for the cores include companies such as Barco.
Xilinx has a combination SoC/FGPA called the Zynq that allows the use of a dual Arm A9 – later a quad core A53 and Mali GPU as well as other dedicated silicon. Xilinx can support UltraHD and HEVC at 4KP60.
Fidus uses the semiconductors to exploit its ip core for the support of Thine’s V-by-One interface, which is becoming more attractive as resolutions and frame rates go up. “LVDS is horrible with UltraHD and 120Hz”, we heard. Inrevium of Japan is working with the chips to develop support for 8K.
NGCodec was showing uncompressed and HEVC-I compressed video side-by-side to highlight high quality and low latency. The codec runs on the KC705 Kintex-7 FPGA Evaluation Kit with the HDMI4K FMC from Inrevium.
Intopix and its Tico compression system is supported on Xilinx FGPAs.
Xilinx has put a lot of effort into its tools to allow an easy conversion from ‘C++’ programs directly to hardware to allow easier conversion to hardware after software solutions are developed. The company can support heterogenous environments.
