Virtex-5 in China HD video card

What was that I just said about there being more to the National Association of Broadcasters’ show than meets the eye? Third time may be the charm for FPGAs, as Dayang Technology Development Inc. just announced the use of Xilinx Inc.’s Virtex-5 in its Red Bridge III HD video card.

The Chinese company cited the mix of GTP transceivers, DSP slices, and PCI Express connectivity as a reason for choosing the Virtex-5. Red Bridge III is aimed at ingest servers, non-linear editing, and broadcast graphics. Its two-input, four-output PCI Express bus can support both SDI and HD-SDI. The ability to support a x8 PCIe bus in a single slot was due to Xilinx’s hard IP block. HD-SDI-to-PCI Express bus transfers are aided through the use of a MicroBlaze soft processor core in the design.

While the RocketIO transceivers in Virtex-5 often are used in all-Ethernet environments, in Red Bridge III they were chosen to support a multiple-protocol environment, using both standard and proprietary protocols. The card ius being shown at Booth 9606 at NAB’s South Upper Hall in the Las Vegas Convention Center.