Snell & Wilcox Rely on Altera Reconfigurability for Product Definition
 Snell
& Wilcox is an engineering-led electronics group specializing in the
design and manufacture of high quality, multi-standard digital image processing
products for the broadcast television, video, and film industries. Snell
& Wilcox designers used Altera device reconfigurability
to tackle a problem common to many systems designers: building a set of
designs with the same basic functionality, but with different feature
sets for each version of the design. In this case, the set of products
they set out to build shared a similar purpose (manipulation of digital
video data) and an identical I/O requirement serial digital interface
(SDI). Designs with common or identical I/O requirements can utilize the
same PC board layout, creating a significant savings in design development,
testing, and manufacturing costs.
To meet this challenge, Snell & Wilcox designed a reconfigurable
video processor platform based on Altera FLEX 10K devices called the D1
processor. The D1 processor consists of one or two FLEX 10KE devices, a
microprocessor, Flash and SRAM devices, and an SDI input and output. Although
each of the D1 processor-based products performs different functions,
many of them share identical signal processing blocks that have been developed
by Snell & Wilcox. Additionally, they use the same board layout, and
their designer has been able to take advantage of these similarities to
significantly reduce their development, verification, and manufacturing
times.
The D1 processor is the basis of six of their product families, including
aspect ratio converters, digital picture fixers, video noise reducers,
and several types of synchronizers. Two of the latest D1 processor-based
products are the embedded audio processor and the flexible synchronizer.
The embedded audio processor extracts audio data from the data stream
and re-embeds it, and reuses audio processing from another Snell &
Wilcox product, the advanced frame synchronizer. The flexible synchronizer
is designed to synchronize both frames and lines of video data. Video
memory components cannot perform this function, since their minimum delays
are generally in the 20 to 30 microsecond range, which is too long for
this purpose. Instead, the Snell & Wilcox design uses the embedded
memory of the PLD to hold a line of video data (1K bytes of 10-bit words)
and a reference video signal to re-synchronize it with the data held in
an external video frame memory buffer. "We saved three to five man-months
of effort per product by using the Altera-based D1 Processor," states
Barry Flannaghan, Technical Director for Snell & Wilcox, "and that
doesn't include the costs we saved by not having to prototyping and build
new hardware. It was such a successful approach for us that the D1's successor
is based on APEXTM 20K devices, and includes multiple SDI inputs and outputs,
including a composite monitor output."
For more information on Snell & Wilcox's use of Altera solutions for reconfigurable products, read this article from the Integrated System Design web site, PLDs and Their Users Benefit from In-Field Reconfiguration Options".
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