News and New Products

Receivers reinforce digital-display-interface ecosystem

By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor -- EDN, 3/25/2008

I’m admittedly a bit more bullish about DisplayPort than I was at the beginning of last year (see “Connecting systems to displays with DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort: What we got here is failure to communicate,” EDN, Jan 4, 2007, pg 46). Supporters of the standard have followed through on their promise to broaden DRM (digital-rights-management) support beyond relatively unknown Certicom to encompass pervasive and Hollywood-blessed HDCP (high-bandwidth-digital-content protection). And the backing of Intel has substantially evolved since early 2007’s rumors into current integration plans within next-generation core-logic chip sets.

Nonetheless, even the most fervent DisplayPort backers privately admit that they will be unable to fully shed the yoke of Silicon Image control and royalty payments. While DisplayPort specification development crawled toward completion, HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface)-silicon shipments were rapidly ramping into a diversity of CE (consumer-electronics) equipment, leading to today’s HDMI dominance in both video sources, including optical-disc players, set-top boxes, and camcorders, and destinations, such as displays and capture peripherals. To wit, although LCDs targeting use in office environments may be able to get away with DisplayPort-only digital inputs, any display with even the slightest possibility of requiring a CE tether will also need to encompass HDMI support.

Either a single-interface dominance or dual-port détente suits Integrated Device Technology just fine because the company is focusing its DisplayPort product-development efforts on display-intended receiver ICs, thereby explaining their PanelPort marketing monikers. IDT’s first offering is the $5 (10,000) VPP1600EMG, which comes in a 100-lead TQFP and is now available for sampling; full production should occur by the end of this summer.

The device builds on a conventional DisplayPort 1.1a foundation by also integrating TCON (timing-controller) circuitry, and its adaptive-equalization capabilities make it a candidate for not only external-display configurations, but also internal-display buses, in which it would replace, for example, an LVDS (low-voltage-differential-signaling) interface within a notebook PC. IDT also plans a series of VPP11xx DisplayPort receivers, which will eliminate the TCON function block to reduce cost.

Although display interfaces represent a new product category for IDT, the company has leveraged its expertise in mixed-signal integration, SERDES (serializer/deserializer), and other relevant technologies that it honed over many years’ worth of high-speed-memory, buffer, PHY (physical-layer), clock-management, and similar semiconductor designs. Near-term competitors include Analogix and Genesis Microchip, which STMicroelectronics acquired in late January.