Altera Corporation, announced
today that Harris Corporation, an international communications and information
technology company, has selected the Stratix II GX FPGA for use in their Harris
Platinum™ line of large-scale routing switchers.
The Harris Platinum line
supports a wide range of video signal formats, up to 1080p (3 Gbps) using
Altera’s triple rate 3G SDI IP core. The Harris Platinum line allows for signal
routing of any size, and supports most digital video signal formats. This robust
FPGA-based architecture provides the flexibility required to future-proof
broadcast hardware investments.
“Using Altera’s leading-edge
FPGA technology, we were able to be productive right from the beginning of the
project,” said, Mark Sizemore, Engineering Manager, Harris Broadcast
Communications. “Altera offers a complete 1080p development framework including
IP, devices and tools to accelerate and optimize development time, which for us
helped our time to market and product success.
Stratix II GX FPGAs support 3G
SDI data speeds with up to 20 triple-rate SDI full-duplex transceiver channels
operating across a range of 270 Mbps to 3 Gbps. Its transceiver circuitry
supports data rates up to 6.375 Gbps and integrates hard-coded clock/data
recovery (CDR) and serializer/deserializer (SERDES) functions.
Maintaining high-definition
signal integrity with a complete development framework, including a high
quality, triple rate 3G SDI IP core enables dramatic increases in engineering
team productivity and allows greater flexibility for the line of routing
switchers.
Arun Iyengar, Senior Director,
Altera’s Communication Business Unit, “Working with leading companies like
Harris, Altera is enabling the industry overhaul to 3-Gbps SDI technology. The
demand for 1080p functionality is a key driver for large scale broadcast routing
for using SDI transport. By providing entire development platforms, Altera is
collaborating with companies like Harris to focus on value add differentiated
design, like this unique and flexible audio/video broadcast switching system.”
The Stratix II GX I/O bank
structure allows for 128 data lines between the top and bottom memory
controllers (1.8 SSTL), LVTTL at 3.3V for control, LVDS for the TDM interface
plus the 3G transceivers, which use an independent PLL per Rx line allowing
multiple transceivers to be assigned per quad to easily support either the eight
inputs or eight outputs offered in the Harris Platinum I/O modules. This
functionality limits the number of signals that can be affected by any one
module, thus increasing system reliability.
