This is an example of a customer wanting to use us to supplement their existing skills base. The customer was designing a twenty screen video system with four input channels and independent graphics overlay for each screen.

We were able to contribute our comprehensive programmable logic expertise by designing the FPGA's used in the system.

We worked in close liason with our customer's own design engineers in a flexible and responsive manner, giving additional support and advice where possible.

In the final design we have partioned the programable logic into ten 100,000 gate FPGA's. Within these FPGAs four Video processors and twenty graphics engines have been implemented.

The video procesors route the video streams, performing scaling and positioning transformations as required. Each graphics engine is in effect a VGA Controller and has built in hardware features such as animation support for generating real time display overlays.

Using FPGAs provided our customer an alternative to asics that was very attractive on the grounds of both cost and development timescales. We were able to make further cost savings by incorporating a firmware PCI core that we had previously developed, thus avoiding the need for a discrete PCI device.