Xilinx at NAB: Any Media Over Any Network

The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show has just started, April 11-16th in Las Vegas. It covers a very broad range of topics:
As the premier trade association for broadcasters, NAB advances the interests of our members in federal government, industry and public affairs; improves the quality and profitability of broadcasting; encourages content and technology innovation; and spotlights the important and unique ways stations serve their communities.

That is a big range from content to technology. House of Cards to network interface cards.

Xilinx will be there. Programmable logic devices are a key component in a lot of video transmission technologies, being a good combination of flexibility, performance and power. When standards have not totally settled down, programmability is essential, but just using general purpose microprocessors and software consumes too much power, and simply is not high enough performance for many video applications anyway.

In fact Xilinx just launched its next generation of Video over IP connectivity solutions to address the industry’s transition to all IP-based networks. The transition to IP-based technologies is creating huge opportunities for cost savings, video production efficiency, and scalability, but its newness is also creating some confusion and hesitation by some vendors in terms of protocol selection. A programmable Xilinx device in conjunction with an Ethernet PHY offers a firmware upgradeable Video over IP platform that supports any media over any network with cores and reference designs enabling fast time-to-market and low risk deployment.

Xilinx defines and deploys Video over IP protocols for contribution and distribution networks with the provision of IP cores and reference designs. These cores encapsulate multiple compressed JPEG 2000 or MPEG transport streams, or uncompressed SDI streams onto 1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet IP networks, and offer optional Forward Error Correction (FEC) to recover lost packets and provide robustness in media transmission.

Xilinx will be at NAB on booth N5616 demonstrating their video technology cores and full reference designs. Of course all these demonstrations run on Kintex or Zynq programmable platforms.

• 6G & 12G SDI —this will showcase reference designs that enable developers to implement the latest SMPTE standards for SDI
• HDMI—IP cores for both HDMI 1.4 Tx/Rx and HDMI 2.0 Tx/Rx
• 4K Video Processing—the new Real-Time Video Engine reference design. It also features a motion adaptive deinterlacer, scaler, and OSD at 4K.
• SMPTE ST 2059 & ST 2022—demonstration of the upcoming ST 2059 IP core
• intoPIX TICO—the intoPIX TICO mezzanine compression provides up to 4:1 visually lossless compression.
• Omnitek PCIe Streaming DMA Controller
• NGCodec HEVC Encoder—this will implement an HEVC encoder using the HDMI IP cores.

It is not just Xilinx who will be there, but also their partners showing solutions based on Xilinx fabrics: CoreEL are at SU12203, Fidus at N4739, inrevium at N4739, intoPix at C8425a, Omnitek at 3114, Barco-Silex at C8427b and Pathpartner at SU10826.

Xilinx’s specialized broadcast page is here. NAB’s own webpage is here. If you are at NAB then come by booth N5616 and see what any media over any network means.