September 6, 2012 -- Altera Corp. today announced a high-performance system-development kit capable of handling "beyond HD" resolutions and formats for those designing multi-channel, high-resolution video-processing systems. As broadcast companies adopt IT servers and technologies to lower costs, designers must build optimized products while still meeting the performance requirements of high-resolution, dense-channel video applications. Unlike typical FPGA broadcast development kits that only have basic design examples, Altera's Advanced Systems Development Kit supports a complete BSP (board-support package) with firmware and PCI Express (PCIe) streaming drivers. It is also PCIe-form-factor compliant, enabling companies to deploy it in both commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and purpose-built servers.

Commenting on the use of the new kit, Gerard Phillips, Engineering Group Manager for technology development at Snell, an innovator in digital media technology, said, "At Snell, we differentiate our image-processing and content-management solutions through our portfolio of intellectual property. In working closely with Altera, we recognized the need for a common platform that enables a faster path from algorithms to our mix of products. Altera's Advanced Systems Development Kit provides significant productivity advantages for our development teams and will allow us to bring new products to market in even less time."

Altera's new kit incorporates enough logic resources, I/O bandwidth, and external memory bandwidth to handle up to 8K ultra HD video processing. Features of the Advanced Systems Development Kit include:

Two 28-nm Altera Stratix V FPGAs. >1.5-Tbps external memory throughput. PCIe Gen3x16 bandwidth. PCIe-form-factor compliant. FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) front-panel expansion, for connectivity via popular standards such as SFP+ and QSFP. High-speed mezzanine card (HSMC) expansion. Option for BSP with Linux and Windows 7 drivers and an example video application software

Posted by: John Miklosz