FPGA / Video Processing.
University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environment came to us to design a custom video processing board. This board takes four HDMI video inputs, and implements custom, real-time video processing on the video streams and then outputs the result over four HDMI outputs.
The board implements all the processing in a Virtex 4 FPGA with four independent banks of SDRAM. The FPGA design was written in VHDL and debugged utilizing a full-simulation testbench which simulated data traffic from all four video streams simultaneously.
The board has a USB interface for setup and control and a SD card interface for data storage. We also developed a Windows GUI interface to set up and control the board and load new coefficients for the algorithm.
Sapphire Computers uses FPGAs to add flexibility and performance to many of our designs. We have great depth of experience dealing with the complexities of FPGA vendors’ tools and overcoming the obstacles to getting a design to compile, route and meet timing, even in situations where the design requires maximum performance or maximum utilization, or both.
FPGA Design Capabilities
- Xilinx, Actel and Altera tools and experience
- VHDL design entry with design optimization using Synplify
- Full system simulation using Modelsim simulator supporting VHDL and Verilog
- Extensive experience with utilizing soft and hard processor in FPGA designs
- Design for test and test vector generation experience
- Detailed experience in floorplanning, hand placement, hand routing and design optimization for maximum performance
- Extensive experience implementing in FPGAs: PCIe, PCI, Gigabit Ethernet, DDR2, DDR3 SDRAM, Aurora, USB, SPI, I2C, SD Flash, CAN interfaces.
- We have worked with partial reconfiguration, security, SECMON, anti-tamper, IPSEC to protect sensitive FPGA designs
- Implemented designs with SEU mitigation, TMR, ECC and scrubbing
- Gigabit serial interfaces: optical and over copper
