. Designers of high-end video broadcast, storage, distribution systems, and professional DVD mastering equipment can now replace their current multi-chip custom ASIC solutions with a single Xilinx® Virtex-II® Platform FPGA, significantly reducing the total bill of material costs of a given design. "High-end video encoder manufacturers want to differentiate themselves from their competition by adding features while simultaneously cutting costs. Because additional features require additional chips in an ASIC-based solution, it's difficult for manufactures to meet both their feature and cost cutting goals," said Michelle Abraham, senior analyst at In-Stat/MDR. "The combination of the Duma Video core in a Xilinx FPGA provides an alternative that is not only much less expensive, but provides the capacity to add unique functionality without increasing cost."
Single FPGA-Based Solution
The Duma Video DV-1 high-definition encoder cores open the door to a single-chip Virtex-II-based real-time system with a total cost of less than $600. In addition to lowering chip count and cost, the FPGA-based solution allows designers to easily encode multiple bit rates, and support multiple video and audio formats. In contrast, current real-time systems must break the MPEG video stream into pieces and process each stream in parallel using multiple compression ASIC or ASSP devices, which can drive the total silicon cost up to $3,000.
"The system level features of the Xilinx Virtex-II family are what make these cores possible," said Sultan Weatherspoon, president of Duma Video. "The design uses block and distributed RAM, embedded multipliers, digital clock managers and high-speed DDR SDRAM Select-I/O capabilities to achieve this level of integration and performance. We simply could not do this with any other FPGA architecture."
These cores expand the Xilinx Virtex FPGA solution - the industry's most complete, highest-performance and highest-density FPGA solution available on the market today. The solution includes the industry's fastest development software, largest library of IP cores and algorithms, and unparalleled customer support. For more information about Xilinx programmable systems, visit www.xilinx.com/platformfpga.
Availability
The cores are available now directly from Duma Video under the terms of the SignOnce IP License, the industry's first multi-vendor common license for FPGA-based IP (www.xilinx.com/ipcenter/signonce.htm). For more information on these cores, visit the Xilinx IP center at www.xilinx.com/ipcenter.
About Duma Video
Duma Video Inc. aims to be the market leader in providing real-time HDTV and standard definition TV MPEG-2 & 4 video encoding solutions. Based in Portland, Oregon, Duma Video is poised to capture the fast-growing market for real-time video encoding over broadband networks. The key is our innovative use of FPGA chips. Our system promises flexible design with broadcast resolution, all on a single FPGA. For more information, visit Duma Video on the Internet at www.dumavideo.com.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the leading supplier of complete programmable logic solutions, including advanced integrated circuits, software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as intellectual property cores, and unparalleled field engineering support. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today. Xilinx solutions enable customers to reduce significantly the time required to develop products for the computer, peripheral, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, aerospace, defense, and low-power portable and consumer markets. For more information, visit the Xilinx web site at http://www.xilinx.com.
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