| Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff |
| When one PLD just isn't enough |
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| dexters_lab:
This amused me a bit, it's the image processing card from another bit of quantel broadcast video hardware called HAL i have been tinkering with, its from the 1990s and does multi-layer video compositing this card does all the rotation, scaling, perspective and 3D warps/transforms on the video data no less than 82 Altera Flex EPF8282 PLDs! why not use fewer larger PLDs or an FPGA? :-// I guess they had their reasons! |
| frozenfrogz:
Wow. That looks intimidating :P I guess at that time there was not that much bigger - better - faster hardware available at reasonable prizes. CPLDs have been introduced by Altera in 1988 (?) and the first FPGAs have not been around much longer. |
| dexters_lab:
sorry shameless bump! spent a bit of time using and learning about this card, it was introduced by Quantel in 1995, it looks like they are using the Flex as they are SRAM based, they are fast and re-programmable on the fly. There doesn't appear to be any code storage for the PLDs so it's all loaded over from the main operating system, so i would speculate all or parts of it get reprogrammed depending on the task. So in effect the card is like a GPU i think. The PCB is 10 layers. The three large ceramic devices are Logic 2246 10-bit image filters that do bi-linear filtering, the other Ratheon 3211 device i can't find any data on. The parts in the lower left corner are an Inmos 805 25Mhz CPU and 16mb ram that acts as the interface between the card and the main system. anyone care to speculate what the manufacturing cost would have been in 1995? |
| donmr:
Many small devices will also have more I/O pins. If they want to implement several independent functions, or several copies of the same function, then using several smaller devices could be a good approach. |
| BrianHG:
--- Quote from: dexters_lab on February 26, 2018, 10:16:37 am ---This amused me a bit, it's the image processing card from another bit of quantel broadcast video hardware called HAL i have been tinkering with, its from the 1990s and does multi-layer video compositing this card does all the rotation, scaling, perspective and 3D warps/transforms on the video data no less than 82 Altera Flex EPF8282 PLDs! why not use fewer larger PLDs or an FPGA? :-// I guess they had their reasons! --- End quote --- Most of those may have the same program, basic bux musing & a few bytes cache, or, simple data multiplier & adder. Buying in such quantity + perhaps a quick mask from Altera brings down cost compared to 1 giant FPGA + bootprom at the time of design. |
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