Enhancing the video focus

Ever so subtly, we’ve noticed each of the FPGA vendors in the past year or two emphasize certain specialty markets on the high end: Xilinx in DSP and signal acquisition, Lattice in embedded PC and display, Actel in mil/aero and space, and Altera in frame-grabbing and video streaming. Given those informal directions, it’s no surprise that Altera will be emphasizing its presence at the International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam in mid-September.

The company is promising video format conversions, video capture and playback over PCI Express,  JPEG2000 transfer over IP, and DisplayPort 1.1a implemented as a core for Altera FPGAs. If I was going to Amsterdam and had to choose one demo to see first, it might be DisplayPort. That’s not because it will be the most visually interesting, far from it. But the anticipated slugfest between HDMI and DisplayPort (with USB 3.0 as a dark horse) seems to be hovering in limbo while chip and system vendors try to gain some sense of how consumers will network their home theater networks. I was beginning to worry that HDMI was gaining a significant lead, and the availability of DisplayPort IP might make the game more interesting.