Xilinx Announces Advanced Reference Designs To Accelerate Design Of Flat-Panel Displays

The various solutions have been validated on an advanced FPGA-based digital displays hardware development platform based on the Spartan-3 FPGA family. The platform provides a connection to a video source where the Spartan-3 FPGA stores the image in memory and manipulates it on a frame-by-frame basis. The enhanced image is then output to either LVDS or DVI connectors, enabling support for multiple panel types. The development platform uses an integrated 32-bit MicroBlaze™ RISC processor in the FPGA to run complicated processes, such as false contour reduction, which requires a high-speed memory interface for frame-by-frame motion compensation and estimation.

“We are accelerating customer time-to-market by delivering advanced digital displays solutions such as precise gamma correction, image dithering engines and color temperature adjustment compensation, dynamic false contour reduction and image dithering engines on the market’s lowest-cost FPGA family,” said Mr. Madhukar Dev, CEO of Tata Elxsi, a leading provider of customized design solutions. “Not only does this accelerate customer time-to-market at a lower cost point - any designer using a Spartan-3-based display development board can easily evaluate these complex algorithms in minutes.”

“We have targeted our digital displays solutions development to the Xilinx Spartan family of devices, which we feel best addresses the high-performance and low-cost requirements of the flat-panel television industry,” said Brian Donahoe, President of DDC, a craftsman organization committed to providing best-in-class design services for the digital industry. “Customers can implement our favorite color transformation, motion artifact compensation and auto contrast, sharpness enhancement and noise reduction algorithms easily on a Spartan device to quickly deliver leading-edge image quality products to the marketplace.”

“Customers are looking for solutions to implement integrated contrast and color enhancement algorithms while still maintaining flexibility to tune flat panel displays to account for regional variations in color preferences,” said Michael Tusch, president and managing director of Apical Ltd ., a leading provider of advanced image processing solutions. “We found the Xilinx Spartan-3 family of devices capable of supporting the high-speed parallel digital signal processing required to implement our advanced dynamic range correction algorithms, while providing the necessary programmable flexibility required for displays’ color customization requirements.”

Digital Displays Solutions
Xilinx partners DDC, Tata Elxsi and Apical have proven reference design offerings for both the digital display panel and the video board. These companies are all members of the Xilinx Alliance Program, which requires their solutions to pass a rigorous certification process. The fully certified digital displays and video board solutions include:

About Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGAs
Based on its industry leading performance and low price points, the Spartan Series has been broadly adopted in high-volume, consumer applications such as DVD players, plasma displays and HDTV - resulting in an estimated 70% percent lead over the company’s nearest competitor. With the recent introduction of its Spartan-3E family, Xilinx continues to add new market-specific features to its low cost Spartan Series while reducing the cost by 30X since its introduction. For more information on the Spartan-3 and Spartan-3E FPGA families, please visit www.xilinx.com/esp/S3.htm.

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.

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