DSP SOLUTIONS

Processor Offers Ten Times Performance for Video Transcoding and Enables HD

A new DaVinci™ digital media processor from Texas Instruments is designed for video transcoding in commercial and consumer products. The TMS320DM6467 will allow consumer products such as set-top boxes to act in the role of a digital media adapter, converting video data on demand, in real time, in any common format.



Texas Instruments says that the DM6467 enables multi format high definition video processing at one tenth the cost and more than ten times the performance when compared with current solutions performing simultaneous encode and decode.

The new multicore device integrates an ARM926 core, TMS320C64x+™ DSP core, High Definition Video/Imaging Co-Processor (HD-VICP) and video data conversion engine. The HD-VICP offers more than 3GHz of equivalent DSP processing power through dedicated accelerators for HD 1080i H.264 high profile transcoding, while the video data conversion engine manages video processing tasks including downscaling, chroma sampling and menu overlay functionality.

Less than 300MHz of the DSP core’s processing capability is used to manage the multi format video transcoding, leaving the rest of the DSP headroom available for additional application performance. Although the device is primarily intended for use in products such as media gateways, its flexibility and efficiency also makes it an attractive option in other applications such as video telephony, and video security markets where it is necessary to provide multiple channels of standard definition encoding.

The device also includes a wide variety of communication facilities, including PCI bus, gigabit Ethernet, a range of serial I/O ports and video port interfaces that allow standard, high definition and raw video capture, and standard or high definition display.



The TMS320DM6467 processor takes full advantage of TI’s proven DaVinci development environment including complete hardware, software and development tools with the DM6467 Digital Video Evaluation Module (DVEVM). The DM6467 DVEVM includes a demonstration version of MontaVista Linux, industry standard and DaVinci Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), DaVinci Codec Engine and a range of multimedia codecs for evaluation. In addition to standard video, imaging, speech and audio codecs, the system includes new transcoders, such as MPEG-2 to H.264.



Features

• High performance digital media SoC
• 594MHz TMS320C64x+ VLIW DSP core
• 297MHz ARM926EJ core
• Two programmable High Definition Video Image Co-Processor (HDVICP) engines
• Video Data Conversion Engine (VDCE)
• Video Port Interface (VPIF)
  • Handles SD, HD and raw capture, SD and HD display
• Multiple digital interfaces including Ethernet, PCI, SPI and ATA
• Full development support
• Evaluation hardware
• Software including standards codecs and transcoders

Applications

• Media gateways
• Multipoint control units
• Digital media adaptors
• Video security
• Digital video recorders
• IP set-top boxes
• Video telephony

For further information, including the TMS320DM6467 Datasheet and a DaVinci Newsletter, please click here