Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced that it will demonstrate the industry's first single-chip 4K format conversion reference design integrating a serial digital interface (SDI) at IBC 2010 (Hall 5, Booth A19), held at the RAI Center in Amsterdam from September 9 to 14. Today, the adoption of 4K resolution is increasing in next-generation Pro A/V applications such as digital cinema, digital billboards, live events, and video conferencing.
Altera's 4K reference design enables highly rapid design work for video applications by including the Video Design Framework. It also allows for the development of custom video and image processing designs by including the MegaCore-capable Video and Image Processing (VIP) Suite. Furthermore, it includes hardware demos utilizing the Stratix IV GX A/V Kit, Nios II embedded processor, multiport front-end DDR3 memory controller, and integrated SDI for affordable 4K video capture, editing, playback, format conversion, and projection solutions. By combining these capabilities to provide an optimized video design toolflow that supports 4K resolution and 3D processing, this broadcast-grade 4K reference design accelerates customer time-to-market.
Due to the advantages of superior image clarity and realism, 4K resolution is rapidly spreading as the next-generation enhancement technology for video. Many major projector, broadcast, and camera OEMs are currently releasing systems or plan to do so within this year. For these next-generation applications, Altera enables a reduction in the overall number of system chips, thereby reducing the overall bill of materials (BOM) cost of the final product, as well as lowering development costs and simplifying board design. Previous systems required as many as nine standard chips to perform 4K format conversion (four 1080p format conversion chips and five chips for SDI input and output). By utilizing Altera’s 4K format conversion reference design based on a single Stratix IV EP4SGX230 FPGA, these functions can be conveniently integrated, and because it provides sufficient performance headroom, other video I/O such as DisplayPort or video compression (encoding/decoding) processing can also be integrated. Christie/Vista Systems is one of the early adopters of this technology.

John Motter, Senior Design Engineer at Vista Systems and Hardware System Architect for the X20, stated, "Our Spyder X20 video processor has the performance to handle dual 4K displays or a single 3D 4K display. To design this, in order to move such a large number of pixels through the system without compression and with minimal latency..."