Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
When one PLD just isn't enough
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BrianHG:

--- Quote from: dexters_lab on February 26, 2018, 10:16:37 am ---no less than 82 Altera Flex EPF8282 PLDs!

--- End quote ---
Those PLDs arent big enough to do anything else than count, load/store a few bytes of data, address decode and mux/demux.
They are not doing any 3D, blending, mixing.  The LOGIC LF2246GC33 has 11 x 10 bit multipliers in a 2D matrix designed to be an image filter, so, it's doing deep color image processing.

As for checking the data sheet, the EPF8282 is fast enough to mux/demux 32 bits into a 10 wire bus and back at 108MHz (8x the speed of NTSC/PAL sample clock of 13.5MHz, the pixel speed) / 4 equals sending 2 pixels/1 video sample clock, or add 32 bit address as well, means sending 1 pixel per sample period.  Place them all over your PCB and you can send/receive pixels with address from any point A to any point B on your PCB with only 10 wires.  Or, you can do this with multiple banks of 6 wires, one for address, one for pixel.  Looking at all the memory and buffers and sections on the multiple boards of the quantel, this divides your wire count between sections by 8 fold and you can now have multiple dedicated buses.  Especially when feeding the LOGIC LF2246GC33 multipliers from different frame and mask banks either stored or computed elsewhere on the paintbox.
BrianHG:
Remember, that memory isn't blazingly fast to begin with, and they have different CPU architectures all over the place & I'm sure on different PCBs as well.
fpgaarcade:
I used to work in Quantel R&D, if you have any questions from that period.
I know the guy well who designed the image card, I worked on the slightly later stuff.
/Mike
Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: fpgaarcade on December 28, 2018, 03:49:51 pm ---I used to work in Quantel R&D, if you have any questions from that period.
I know the guy well who designed the image card, I worked on the slightly later stuff.
/Mike

--- End quote ---
Can you tell us more about the decisions that lead to this or similar designs?
fpgaarcade:
Sure, I'll respond later this evening. I joined Q in 93 ish so this card was just leaving R&D and going into production.
I used a lot of the ideas on this card for the first generation of image processing on the HD machines.

Interestingly, this card replaced three boards in the Henry system - which was great as it freed up slots for, well, more of them!

/Mike
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