Asia Pacific, April 12, 2012 – Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) announced today that goHDR, one of the early customers of the OpenCL program for FPGA, has significantly shortened development time and dramatically increased performance by leveraging Altera's OpenCL program for FPGA. Working closely with Altera, goHDR ported its proprietary C-code to the OpenCL standard and implemented the code on FPGA in less than a week, whereas this process typically takes three to six months using traditional HDL flow.
The two companies integrated Altera's expertise in FPGA technology with goHDR's deep knowledge of HDR (high-dynamic range) to leverage OpenCL as a common language that enabled goHDR to rapidly develop HDR-enabled television solutions. The solution implements goHDR's proprietary video codec algorithm on Altera FPGA, enabling conventional televisions to display HDR video content at real-time speeds of at least 25fps (frames per second). By using the OpenCL standard, goHDR was able to work entirely in a C-level environment and rapidly perform multiple design iterations on their FPGA design.
Alan Chalmers, Director of Innovation at goHDR, stated, "HDR video requires massive data and computation, which presents significant technical challenges when processing video on platforms such as televisions or set-top boxes. FPGAs provide a highly competitive alternative to traditional multi-core CPUs and GPUs, but we were not experienced VHDL programmers." He continued, "Altera's OpenCL solution was very well suited to our HDR television application and made it very easy to implement. By working with Altera's OpenCL program for FPGA, we were able to build and deploy our system in less than a week and meet the performance requirements of our project within the limited development timeframe."
goHDR provides advanced data compression algorithms to customers developing HDR technology. The encoding/decoding software developed by goHDR supports the adoption of HDR video across various fields including motion pictures, television, computer games, security, and mobile communication devices.
Altera announced its OpenCL program for FPGA in November 2011. As part of the program, Altera has begun working with early customers, universities, and standards groups to define and develop OpenCL solutions for FPGA. OpenCL for FPGA integrates the OpenCL parallel programming language with FPGA's parallel performance capabilities to deliver higher performance compared to multi-core CPU and CPU/GPU-based systems while reducing development time.
Alex Grbic, Director of Software, DSP, and IP Marketing at Altera, stated, "Through our OpenCL program for FPGA, we are enabling designers to more easily accelerate their designs through FPGA." He continued, "OpenCL for FPGA provides significant productivity advantages to designers who have traditionally modeled their algorithms in C and then converted them to HDL. The OpenCL for FPGA solution is further accelerating FPGA adoption across diverse markets including military, medical, computing, and broadcast."
Online learning materials for Altera's OpenCL program, including videos and white papers, as well as information on registering for or receiving additional information about Altera's OpenCL program, can be found at http://www.altera.com/OpenCL.