March 24, 2009 -- Conexant Systems, Inc. and Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. have announced the availability of a jointly developed reference design for PC-based video surveillance products with digital video recording (DVR) capabilities.

The new reference design is based on Conexant’s CX25853 multi-port video decoders and CX258521 media bridge, which comprise a complete, industry-standard D1 video-capture solution for real-time video surveillance DVR applications. It also includes Maxim’s MG3500 H.264 video compression solution, which increases recording capacity on DVRs and supports multiple channels of low-latency, full D1 video. The reference design supports up to 16 channels of real-time capture and compression.

The reference design also features Lattice Semiconductor’s ECP2 FPGAs, which are used to perform key video format conversions.

About Conexant’s and Maxim’s Video surveillance solutions

Conexant’s CX25853 eight-channel video decoder lets multiple analog video streams be captured and displayed simultaneously. Key features that improve video quality include the capability to acquire low-level video signals, horizontal and vertical scaling, and hue, brightness, saturation, and contrast controls. In addition, the high-density architecture lowers per-channel costs by approximately 35%, and substantially reduces board space requirements compared to using two separate four-channel devices.

The company’s companion CX25821 media bridge enables multi-channel, bi-directional uncompressed digital audio and video transfers to a host computer for preview, processing, or compression through the PCI Express (PCIe) interface. The CX25821 also acts as a bridge for compressed H.264 data from the MG3500 to the host via PCIe.