From a framebuffer to HDMI, any off the shelf solutions?

[Mechanical Menace]

I've been playing with an FPGA to take the contents of a framebuffer and transmit it as HDMI, but I'm pretty certain I'll never manage get my Spartan 6 to run fast enough to output 1080p, tbh I'd be surprised if I manage 720p at 30 fps. Does anyone know of any products that can already do this?

Thanks.

[miguelvp]

Forum member hamster_nz was able to drive and an HDMI signal at 1080p it even without an HDMI TX chip:

http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/Spartan_6_1080p

And he was featured on hackaday for it:

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/08/pumping-1080p-video-out-of-an-fpga/

Not sure hamster's implementation would work at full resolution with a frame buffer involved but he is full of surprises so maybe it's possible

But I think with an ADV7513 or similar HDMI-TX with a good DMA implementation it should be easier.
http://www.analog.com/en/products/audio-video/analoghdmidvi-interfaces/analog-hdmidvi-display-interfaces/adv7513.html#product-documentation

You can look at this app note with some verilog examples related to the ADV751x family:
http://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/application-notes/AN-1270.pdf

There are other HDMI-TX chips, so maybe a search for "Xilinx Spartan 6 HDMI-TX example" might find you more information.

Also note that those chips also support audio.

[hamster_nz]

I recently learnt the secret of 1080i, and that too is achievable from a Spartan 6. It isn't well documented how you do it.

If you want a hand in any way just drop me an email .. 

[bruce273]

I'm unsure if you can buy the chips that graphics cards use, I can't remember the name of them but basically the gpu is doing the heavy lifting in respect to the 3d work but the result is passed to a frame buffer. I believe all GPUs must have a frame buffer mapped to a standard location of memory on the computer in order to allow the post messages and other things to be rendered before the OS loads the driver. There's some examples with the raspberry pi into how to access the buffer and pull some information. Though actually writing a program to display a framebuffer using the pi's hdmi port would be a fair challange I would think.

http://raspberrycompote.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/low-level-graphics-on-raspberry-pi-part_9509.html