Broadcast Industry Leader Boosts Engineering Productivity With Altera Triple-Rate SDI Development Kit
2007 Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR)
announced today that Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS) has selected the Stratix® II GX-based development kit and 3-Gbps serial digital interface (SDI) intellectual property (IP) MegaCore® function to reduce development time by several months for their recently introduced line of Platinum™ video broadcast routers.
“Altera’s SDI solution was instrumental in reducing engineering time and maintaining high-definition signal integrity,” said Tim Thorsteinson, president of the Harris Broadcast Communications Division. “Altera provided us with a complete development framework, including a high-quality MegaCore, which optimized our engineering team’s productivity and allowed great flexibility in our video routers.”
Stratix II GX FPGAs support SDI, high-definition (HD)-SDI and 3-Gbps SDI serial data speeds with up to 20 triple-rate SDI full-duplex transceiver channels operating across a range of 270 Mbps to 3 Gbps. Its transceiver circuitry supports data rates up to 6.375 Gbps and integrates hard-coded clock/data recovery (CDR) and serializer/deserializer (SERDES) functions.
Addressing HD Signal Quality Challenges
Maintaining video signal integrity in the studio environment is essential in next-generation switchers, H.264 encoders, routers, transcoders and integrated receiver/decoders. Using the Stratix II GX-based audio/video development kit, broadcast designers can maintain high signal quality in their HD systems. The development kit is the first to support triple-rate SDI, including the SMPTE 424M standard. It simplifies product development by enabling engineers to address HD degradation points, or “quality hot spots,” and implement the full 1080p HD video format in their studio systems.
“Altera and our partners enable cost-effective broadcast system designs that notably improve HD video signal quality,” said Louie Leung, Altera Asia Pacific Marketing Director. “We provide entire development platforms, not just devices, which allow broadcast OEMs to focus on their core competencies and differentiate their A/V systems.”