[Las Vegas Dave]

Interested in HDTV?
Please Freepmail (works best) me if you would like your name added to the HDTV ping list.

The pinged subjects will be those of HDTV technology, satellite/cable HD, OTA (over the air with various roof top and indoor antennas) HD reception. Broadcast specials, Blu-ray/HD-DVD, and any and all subjects relating to HD.

Las Vegas Dave

[Las Vegas Dave]

Pinging the HDTV list.....

HDTV pings

[RC2]

But.........is it true that the new Mitsubishi Lazer TV, that is supposed to be out within the year, will make all the HDTV’s obsolete?

[AZLiberty]

For a 1920×1080-pixel HDTV, that figure would reach 840 Gbytes/hour.

Who ever thinks in Gbytes/hour, unless you're storing movies on a DVD? In more typical units, this is about 250 megabytes/second, which doesn't sound like a huge data flow. Surely, a small number of state-of-the-art DSP chips could easily handle this. I guess the FPGAs are used to provide a custom controller for said set of DSPs.

[tje]

Interesting article. Let’s you know what the problems are.

My conerns are that some sub-standard video quality level will become the defacto standard. (Think iTunes.) And all this great engineering work will be for naught.

[clamper1797]

Designers have begun to apply dynamic image-processing algorithms in FPGAs to convert and map digital-video signals onto display panels.

We've been doing this for a while now ...

[clamper1797]

In addition to a variety of standard available ASSPs, designers are now using low-cost FPGAs with built-in features, such as DSP blocks, memories, microcontrollers, and differential interfaces, to leverage the rapid design cycle.

Maybe some are ... we are not. FPGA's have a lot of un-used stuff in them. We re-use TVP, DDR2-3 DLL, PLL and memory controller modules with just a few tweaks and put them in a small footprint LV ASIC ... 4 months to tapeout ... much better

[adorno]

display clean, smooth pictures on flat-panel HDTVs

For a second there it sounded like "clean, smooth, and flat-panel", like in no pixels that you can see make out on the screen and no scan-lines.

When will that ever happen?

[Sudetenland]

Piffle!

I've been saying the same thing for years...:)

[fremont_steve]

FPGAs are a wonderful thing - they are essentially an uncommitted sea of gates with routing resources. Let’s you put any kind of logic you like into them. They can as easily be used to build customer CPUs as implementing MPEG related algorithms.

The problem is that the larger FPGAs that are able to implement “interesting” functionality usually cost $50-$2000. So only the smallest devices are practical for things that get massed produced.

Application Specific ICs (ASICs) are usually a better answer for competitive applications like consumer electronics.

[Pontiac]

Pepper … and Salt