Video and Audio Applications

One of the most common applications where our IP cores are used is the transmission of audio and video data to the host computer. These can be custom frame grabbers, medical imaging, surveillance cameras, or images from labels for package tracking. The list of video applications continues to grow year after year across all sectors of the industry.

What all applications have in common is, that the data rate in total is so high that transmission can no longer be realized conventionally, but requires PCI Express Direct Memory Access (DMA). Depending on link speed and link width, up to 6 gigabytes net per second can be transferred in one direction. Due to the multi-channel architecture of our cores, several video sources can be transmitted in parallel and share the available bandwidth.

Detail Insights

In essence, the task for the FPGA developer is to convert the video data into AXI Stream format and then connect it to one of the 16 AXI Stream inputs of our core. Using the tuser sideband signals from AXI Stream, end-of-frame is signaled, causing the driver to automatically get interrupts and store the frames in their own data buffers. By means of a user-friendly callback concept, the user application is notified when a frame is ready for pickup and receives a data pointer to the frame. The sophisticated high-level user mode library allows the software user to work with images within a very short time without having to understand the details of the core. Understandable application notes and reference designs are available from us to support you in your development.