Pallab’s Place

The past few years have seen the video broadcast industry dealing with a creeping need for bandwidth and throughput.  This was also met with a trend toward the use of IP blocks in SOCs to address some of the many different avenues of the broadcast marketplace.  The key pieces going into these SOCs the past couple of years has been the SDI interface blocks and the different types of video protocol converters (JPG2000, MPEG4, etc).  The majority of these designs were being implemented in FPGAs.  However, as the transition to digital broadcast becomes immanent, more studios and stations have opted for more traditional high performance specific task hardware that is optimized for the specific broadcast functions.

Gennum has addressed this need for high performance standard products with a group a 10 new 10Gb/s SDI chips that were introduced in April 2009 and demonstrated at NAB.   Gennum initially was a small mixed signal semicoductor company focusing on video, data converters, hearing aids, and custom mixed signal.  They have now rel-aligned and re-targeted on the markets on Video Broadcast, Data Communication, A/V Connectivity and IP Core Licensing.  The current corporation is operating at a 2008 revenue of ~$127M USD and 76% gross margins.

Using these resources, their R&D was able to deliver the following products which may be available as IP cores in the future. One is a3GB/s receiver with equalizer that can drive 160 meters of coax cable.a 3GB/s video optical receiver module that is “error free” over a 60km link, capture solutions using new PCIe bridge and PCIe extender products, and finally a new class of power efficient equalizers, reclockers, and cable drivers.  These products are all either sampling or available in 2009.

PC

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