Xilinx Delivers XtremeDSP Development Platform for Video Development
March 10, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
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Xilinx Inc. announced availability of the XtremeDSP video starter kit - Spartan-3A DSP FPGA edition, a development platform for video applications that require low-cost and high-performance video processing.
Applications include machine vision, multimedia set-top box, endoscope, portable ultrasound, automotive driver assistance and other systems that require low-cost and high digital signal processing (DSP) performance, Xilinx said.
The kit gives designers of video applications video-specific intellectual property (IP), reference designs, XtremeDSP and Xilinx embedded processing development tools and a Spartan-3A DSP field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development board with video daughter card.
The video development kit is part of the Xilinx XtremeDSP product that also includes the XtremeDSP Starter Kit - Spartan-3A DSP FPGA edition.
"Complex video systems that target FPGAs often include a combination of both DSP and embedded processing," said Dean Westman, vice president of marketing for the processor solutions group at Xilinx.
"Xilinx has made a considerable investment to provide a tool flow that integrates these two domains by automatically generating the hardware and software interfaces for the user," Westman said. "This tool flow is included in the kit along with a set of reference designs that leverage this integration to enable developers to rapidly create sophisticated video processing systems."
Video processing performance requirements in markets such as surveillance are increasing beyond the capabilities of a traditional DSP processor, Xilinx said. FPGAs can be used in these applications as co-processors to offload performance critical processing operations or as stand-alone video processing engines.
The parallel computing nature of the FPGA fabric supports much higher sampling rates and more data throughput than a standard DSP, delivering three to four times the performance along with better computational power efficiency, according to the company. The Spartan-3A DSP family delivers 20 billion multiply-accumulates per second (GMACS).
The XtremeDSP video starter kit - Spartan-3A DSP FPGA edition includes video-specific IP including a new video frame buffer controller (VFBC), three reference designs, software drivers and hardware interface support for the various input/output (I/O) interfaces.
This IP is coupled with a Spartan-3A DSP 3400A FPGA development board, cables, video graphics array (VGA) camera and a fixed mobile convergence (FMC) video I/O module that supports digital video interface (DVI) input, single channel in and out composite, S-video in and out and dual camera interfaces.
The kit also comes with system generator for DSP and the Xilinx embedded development kit (EDK). System generator for DSP enables the use of The Mathworks Simulink and Matlab modeling environment for FPGA design. EDK includes the platform studio tools suite, embedded IP cores and the Xilinx MicroBlaze embedded processor.
Source: Xilinx Inc.