Video

Xilinx Announces Next-Generation 28 nm FPGA Families

Xilinx recently announced its next-generation “7 series” FPGAs, featuring new power-saving features as well as increased capacity and performance.  The series will be composed of three chip families, all fabricated in TSMC’s high-k metal gate (HKMG) 28 nm technology.  All three families will use the same logic cells, block RAMs, DSP slices, and I/O cells.  Compared to existing 40 nm Xilinx devices, Xilinx claims that, in typical applications, the new FPGAs will reduce power consumption by 50, Read more...

Octasic Announces Video and Wireless Processor Chips

Octasic Semiconductor recently announced the OCT2200 family of multi-core DSP processors based on its Opus clockless (asynchronous) DSP core.  The OCT2224M is intended for media processing equipment including video conferencing systems, internet video streaming and transcoding, and video surveillance. The OCT2224W is designed for wireless applications, notably smaller basestations such as femtocell, picocell, and low power basestations.  According to Octasic, it can support GSM, EDGE, HSPA, Read more...

Xilinx Unveils High-Performance ARM-based CPU-FPGA Hybrid Platform

Xilinx recently unveiled a new chip architecture integrating an ARM processor with an FPGA fabric. This platform centers around a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor complex, including hardened memory interfaces and peripherals.  The platform architecture, shown in Figure 1, is intended to behave like a CPU first and an FPGA second.  Specifically, the CPU will boot independently—without requiring that the FPGA first be configured.  Xilinx is targeting markets that require both complex software Read more...

CEVA Rolls Out New Programmable Multimedia IP Core for HD Video

CEVA recently announced its third-generation video processor IP offering.  The CEVA-MM3000™ is a programmable subsystem which is designed to support video decode and encode using many video standards, including H.264, VC1, RealVideo and AVS at resolutions up to 1080p (1920×1080 resolution at 30 or 60 frames per second). The CEVA-MM3000 is designed for use in several classes of digital media products including smartphones, tablets, Blu-ray DVD players and set-top boxes. The CEVA-MM3000 Read more...

Synfora’s PICO High-Level Synthesis Tool Achieves BDTI Certification

BDTI recently completed an in-depth evaluation of Synfora’s PICO tool through the BDTI High-Level Synthesis Tool Certification Program™.  BDTI evaluated the process of implementing applications on a Xilinx FPGA using PICO, comparing it with traditional FPGA design based on hand-written RTL code, and with DSP processor software development.  PICO enabled creation of efficient FPGA implementations, with design productivity comparable to that of DSP processor software development.  The Read more...

Quartics Announces Flexible Video Chip

This month fabless semiconductor start-up Quartics introduced the QV1721, a video coprocessor SoC targeting applications such as netbook PCs, set-top boxes and high-definition televisions.  The QV1721 is intended to be used to offload demanding video tasks from the main CPU in a system. The chip provides high-definition video encoding, decoding, and transcoding functions, along with post-processing to improve perceived video quality. Quartics recently demonstrated the QV1721 to BDTI in two Read more...

BDTI Releases Benchmark Results for Toshiba's Venezia Platform

BDTI recently completed a benchmark analysis of the Toshiba MeP “Media embedded Processor” core and “IVC2” SIMD coprocessor, both of which are used in Toshiba’s Venezia mobile multimedia platform. The MeP is a licensable core that is intended to be used as a building block in multi-core, multimedia-oriented SoCs, typically with multiple MeP cores on a chip.  Each MeP core can be customized with specialized instructions, co-processors, and memory sizes. The base MeP core is a single-issue Read more...

Xilinx Intros Spartan-6, Virtex-6; Promises App-Specific Development Support

Xilinx recently introduced two new FPGA chip families, Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 that offer increased capacity and lower power consumption relative to their predecessors. For the first time, the new Spartan and Virtex families use the same underlying architecture to enable easier migration. There are, however, differences in fabrication process and features. Spartan-6 chips will be fabbed in a 45 nm process, while Virtex-6 chips will be fabbed in 40 nm.  Spartan-6 chips incorporate DDR3 Read more...

Fraunhofer Stealthily Advances Compression Technologies

There’s a German research institution that many people outside of Europe have never heard of.  Well, there are probably lots of German research institutions that many people have never heard of, but this particular one, Fraunhofer, was instrumental in developing a technology that millions of people use every day—a little thing called MP3.  Fraunhofer also co-developed AAC and has been involved in developing the H.264 video codec, along with other codecs. But unlike the audio algorithm experts Read more...

Eutecus Moves Video Analytics into Surveillance Cameras

Digital video has become a killer app for signal processing technologies, and video analytics—that is, analysis of digital video to identify specific events or characteristics—is quickly becoming a significant driver in digital video.  Video analytics isn’t one of those solutions looking for a problem; it has an enormous range of potential applications, both commercial (such as intelligent surveillance and traffic monitoring) and military (such as target detection and tracking). Like most Read more...