The kit provides a complete broadcast system design framework by offering in one package Altera’s Video and Image Processing Suite – which offers a wide selection of IP building blocks such as a colour space converter, chroma resampler, gamma corrector, 2D FIR & median filter, alpha blending mixer, scaler and de-interlacer – the Nios II Development Kit, Cyclone II Edition, and add-on cards. These cards include an interface for ASI/SDI (digital video-streams), an interface for Analogue Video and an interface for Gigabit Ethernet. A Digital Audio add-on card (support for AES3 digital audio format and audio Sample Rate Converter) is planned for introduction later this year.

Also included in the kit is a line buffer compiler to efficiently map video line buffers onto on-chip memory. The kit also features Altera’s Quartus II development software and all associated licenses and documentation to provide an integrated offering for a simplified design environment and to speed time-to-market.

Altera has built considerable momentum in delivering solutions for the broadcast industry over the last few years. They have led the industry with a number of programmable logic solutions, including a video over IP reference design, which earlier this year was named by eeProductCenter as an “Ultimate Product” of the year.

“There is high demand in the broadcast industry for FPGA-based product development and Altera is leading the industry in delivering solutions. For instance, last year Altera’s broadcast reference designs were downloaded well over 100 times each,” said Michel Attias, Vice President of Sales and Managing Director for Altera Europe. “With this broadcast development kit, EBV can now help fulfil this large demand as a value-add solution distributor partner for Altera in Europe.”