Video surveillance and oh by the way...

Sometimes it pays to look carefully. A day ago, I was fascinated to see Conexant Systems Inc. and Maxim Integrated Products Inc. announce some joint work on a video surveillance reference design, combining Conexant video decoders and media bridges with Maxim’s H.264 compression products.

It wasn’t until I took a second look that I realized that Lattice Semiconductor Inc.’s ECP2 was mentioned five paragraphs down, almost tangentially, as the video conversion platform gluing it all together.

Now I’m not going to launch into any Rodney Dangerfield rant about the FPGA architecture playing second fiddle in many developers’ centers of attention. After all, FPGAs have all but displaced particular brands of standalone DSPs or integer processors when they are used as a central control-plane or datapath manager.

The story is a little different when the FPGA is playing a more traditional programmable-logic role of integrating glue logic.   When an FPGA scoops up high-speed serial I/O, or performs conversions between different multimedia formats, its role can be almost as important as a microcontroller or network processor. But like a stage manager in a theater production, its presence may be underappreciated.

Kudos to Conexant and Maxim for pulling together a fascinating surveillance reference design, to be shown in early April at ISC West in Las Vegas. But  let’s not forget about the ECP2 – these days, it’s safe to say the FPGA almost always has a starring role.