Deinterlacing done high-def

Faroudja's FLI2200 was one of the first chips to tackle standard-definition de-interlacing (including inverse 3:2 pulldown) for progressive-scan displays. My testing bore out its robustness, it subsequently won a 2001 EDN Innovation of the Year award, and Sage (who launched a successful DCDi branding program, and was subsequently acquired by Genesis Microchip) bought Faroudja.

The world has evolved beyond DVDs, and high-resolution interlaced sources are here in the form of D-VHS and HDTV's 1080i mode. To convert this signal to a progressive-scan 1080-line, 30- or 60 frame-per-second presentation (for compatibility with, for example, LCD TVs), most of today's gear performs a simple 'bob' function. 'Bob' mode effectively delivers only a 540-line effective resolution and exhibits annoying 'jitter' artifacts on fine horizontal image details. The alternative approach, 'weave' (in conjunction with frame duplication, for 60 fps output), conversely, wouldn't compensate for the temporal differences from one field to another, thereby resulting in 'tearing' artifacts. And don't forget; lower-resolution video signals need to be intelligently up-scaled to 1080p for display, too.

Many of the same folks who developed and launched the FLI2200 are now at National Semiconductor, and they think they have a higher-quality approach to solving the problem, one that also addresses other emerging application needs. The company's $49 (1,000) AVC2510 dual-channel video format converter, now sampling, supports and switches between multiple video inputs. It also delivers dual simultaneous outputs ("TwinD" in National Semiconductor marketing-speak), one high-definition and the other standard definition (for monitoring, recording and network streaming purposes), if necessary also supporting different aspect ratios and color mapping parameters.

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The demos I saw at NAB were quite impressive and included both a 1080i-to-1080p 60fps conversion and a standard-definition A-versus-B comparison to today's predominant, less sophisticated de-interlacing approach. The AVC2510 also makes notable advancements over the FLI2200 and follow-on FLI2300 in its suppression of signal noise; color remapping and adaptive contrast enhancement are other "QuietVideo" features that company representatives demonstrated to me. Looks like the Faroudja alumni have another hit on their hands.