September 10, 2010 -- Xilinx, Inc. and Coreworks SA today announced the first availability of a range of new Dolby audio technology and other audio codec IP cores for compressing multi-channel audio in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Integrating these codecs into a single FPGA eliminates the need for digital signal processor (DSP) farms related to high-density multichannel audio streaming applications, thereby lowering overall cost, power consumption and circuit board area.

"Consumers increasingly want surround sound on a wide variety of entertainment platforms including TV, video over IP, and in video games," said Jose T. de Sousa, President of Coreworks. "These new codecs are optimized for Xilinx FPGAs so that broadcast equipment manufacturers can keep up with a fast paced market as they deliver solutions to content providers and producers."

Coreworks designed the new IP cores to fully support Dolby Digital, AAC+ and MPEG-1 Layer II for distribution to the home and Dolby E from professional studio to studio. This support helps designers exploit the parallel processing capabilities of FPGAs for more performance, while lowering bill of material costs through reduced board component count.

"Prior to the development of these cores, all Dolby sound encoding and decoding hardware implementation was available only on DSPs," said Dean Westman, Vice President, Communications Business at Xilinx. "For OEMs working to meet the needs of professional audio encoding and decoding with very high channel counts, the new FPGA-compliant codecs offer reduced power consumption, increased device density, reduced cost and a simplified bill of materials."

Xilinx Broadcast Targeted Design Platform

The new audio codecs make up the IP components of Xilinx's Targeted Design Platform approach that gives developers the ability to stay focused on product differentiation throughout the design cycle and into production in the face of constantly evolving standards and demands on performance. These platform components include IP cores, design environments and reference designs, along with a base set of digital audio/ video development boards and industry standard FPGA Mezzanine Cards (FMC).

For broadcast applications, the Targeted Design Platform approach simplifies the development of complete broadcast audio and video interface solutions, including triple-rate SDI solutions with support for standard definition TV to 3D TV and beyond in a single programmable device. It also enables the earliest possible adoption of emerging standards, such as DisplayPort, rapidly replacing DVI (Digital Visual Interface), and new Ethernet AVB (Audio Video Bridging) technology that guarantees timing and bandwidth availability in IP networks.

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