Xilinx Broadcast at NAB 2012

 April 2012 – Las Vegas, NV – Xilinx had three major themes for the NAB show this year – (1) display targeted solutions for high resolution, (2) source code availability for thier real time solutions, and (3) a video over IP solution.

The display technology was shown based on the new kintex7 FPGA. Using a live feed from a 4K camera they were displaying on a 4K monitor. For the show, the 4K screen was created by panelizing four 1080p screens in a 2×2 arrangement which brings the costo fo doing 4K development down to an affordable price point. The kintex7 design also includes and upscaler that allows 1080i content to be displayed at 4K/2K. In addition to the upscaler, the reference design can downsample from 4K to standard 1080p. The reference design was based on a 10 bit color plane.

Their real time solution includes new reference designs, that include full access free source code, for their full suite of programmable products the Spartan-6, Virtex-6, and Kintex-7. These blocks include HDMI, DisplayPort and picture-in-picture (PIP) support on designs handling full 10 bit 4:4:4 video data. The code for the section managing camera interfaces, switchers, multi-viewers, and scalars has a new web based GUI to ease development. (figure 1).

Xilinx Real Time Video Engine Solution

These designs then drive their long time Edge QAM solutions. At the show, they displayed porting these QAM solutions to both new speeds for next generation QAM, and also additional channels in the same chip. The allows for the creation of full hospitality set-top boxes to be created to support both OTT and/or IPTV service with a single product.

The main feature of the thier new technology was a design created by the BBC called stagebox. The new camera connection allows the 3Gbps SDI interface to be converted in to 1Gbps Cat6 or fiber. Using the H.264 AVC Intra format for compression, the IP from CoreEL allows for minimizing the SDI cable run and replacing it with standard TCP/IP protocol data on a Gb LAN/WAN. This effectively replaces the broadcast truck with a sub $100 GbE router or a GbFC router and then broadcast the live signal though the LAN or high bandwidth WAN, based on availability, to the editing room. (Figure 2)
  

Xilinx BBC StageBox SDI to LAN solution

As routers support large numbers of connections, the expansion of multiple cameras for a live event or a planned studio event is no longer an issue. There is also a great deal of savings in the cost of cabling for the solution. The environment is currently optimized for LAN applications until the cost of the WAN comes down. The solution is implemented using the 7 series FPGA family due to its IO and memory bandwidth capabilities. The solution is currently available as a pro-camera add-on form-factor product.