Another FPGA win at NAB

Here I thought the National Association of Broadcasters’ conference would be a wash for FPGA-based video processing applications. Not so. Word comes today that Harmonic Inc., a market leader in H.264/MPEG encoders, is using the Altera Stratix III in its new HD 1080p encoder to be shown at NAB.

The FPGAs are used in the Electra 8000 platform from its DiviCom division. Ten years ago, Harmonic bought DiviCom, a supplier of open-systems MPEG-2 encoders, from C-Cube Microsystems Inc.  The Altera FPGAs in the new Electra 8000 help perform codec functions for both MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-2 in SD and HD formats.

NAB always has more hardware introductions than some analysts expect. If you’re headed to Las Vegas, be sure to look under the hood for advanced FPGA content.