Xilinx strives to create differentiated consumer electronics products

Market Prospects
Xilinx has been committed to providing programmable logic devices (PLDs) for the high-volume consumer product market for more than 10 years. Consumer electronics is not only the company's largest volume market, but also provides a major market opportunity for the continuous development of the new generation of Xilinx FPGAs and target design platforms. According to IC Insights, the sales scale of the consumer IC market will reach US$51 billion by 2012, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% (see Figure 1).

As the market demand for better performance, smaller size, and greener products grows, many consumer electronics companies face daunting challenges. They need to continuously improve the differentiation of their products in an increasingly competitive market. Faced with tremendous pressure to add new features and reduce costs, these companies will also find that market windows are getting smaller and smaller, market share is getting smaller and smaller, and profit margins are also decreasing.

This is particularly true in the digital display and video market, where consumers are demanding insatiable digital imaging products. Even the industry’s leading digital TV (DTV) OEMs have spent years developing proprietary algorithms to bring high-value, premium products to market. But now, their market window is getting smaller, and new consumer video platforms (3DTV, LED BLU, 4K2K) and digital standards (DisplayPort, V-By-One®HS, high-speed LVDS) are coming to market faster and faster. In addition, as more companies enter the high-definition television (HDTV) market, OEMs can no longer rely solely on price wars to compete, but must find ways to innovate and develop differentiated product features and picture quality.

OEMs have traditionally addressed these design and market challenges by using ASIC or ASSP solutions across their product lines. However, ASIC vendors have not responded quickly enough to meet the requirements for faster time to market, while ASSP vendors have struggled to provide the rich optimization features that meet the needs of a dynamic market. In addition, as developers use advanced semiconductor process technologies to increase performance, memory density, and system-level integration, the NRE costs associated with ASICs and ASSPs will also increase significantly. Needless to say, in this era of highly integrated digital technology, the survival of consumer product manufacturers depends on their ability to do more with less resources, reduce investment risks, and win in the "battlefield" of product differentiation.

Xilinx Programmable Technology Imperative: Eliminate Risk with Design Flexibility
Xilinx is a global leader in programmable logic solutions that provide the best balance of price/performance and features to ensure customer success in the high-volume consumer electronics market. Xilinx FPGAs deliver more than 30 million devices to consumer customers each year and are currently used in a wide variety of consumer products, including digital displays, set-top boxes, multifunction printers, digital cameras, digital camcorders, and portable handheld electronic devices.

Xilinx provides scalable cost options for FPGA and high-flexibility platforms, and achieves system-level integration of high-definition digital video algorithms, high-performance image processing, and high-speed connectivity. The above functions are realized through the Xilinx Targeted Design Platform, which is carefully built to meet the unique technical and design method requirements of the consumer market, and can adapt to changing standards, dynamically developing consumer needs, and shortening product life cycles. In this way, we have obtained the low-risk programmable method required to develop new consumer products and differentiated application platforms, which can accelerate the product listing process and reduce the total system cost compared to ASIC and ASSP implementation plans.

Xilinx consumer target design platform provides all the hardware and software elements needed to build a complete system for low-cost, low-power consumer electronics applications. In addition to domain-optimized silicon chips, the above platform also includes intellectual property (IP) modules, a comprehensive design environment and scalable development kits, supporting target reference designs and a set of basic development boards to support industry-standard FMC connectors and daughter card expansion.

Latest Silicon Optimized for Consumer Applications
Xilinx currently ships more FPGAs to Tier 1 DTV OEMs than any other programmable logic vendor. The latest generation of the Spartan®-6 FPGA family leverages the company’s market leadership by delivering twice the performance at half the power of previous generations, while reducing system costs by up to 50 percent.

Spartan-6 devices are manufactured using mature low-power 45-nanometer process technology, with densities ranging from 3,400 to 148,000 logic cells, and support the lowest cost integrated serial connectivity through power-optimized 3.125Gbps transceivers. System-level integration and power consumption can be further improved through a more efficient dual-register 6-input lookup table (LUT) logic architecture and a rich selection of built-in modules. These built-in modules include second-generation DSP slices, PCI Express® interface cores, 18 Kb (2 x 9 Kb) Block RAM, SDRAM memory controllers, enhanced mixed-mode clock management, and SelectIO™ technology. Spartan-6 FPGAs also support advanced system-level power management modes, automatic detection of configuration selections, and enhanced IP security provided by advanced encryption schemes (AES) and DeviceDNA protection mechanisms.

Spartan-6 FPGAs offer a unique combination of functionality and ease of use, making them a low-cost alternative to custom ASICs or ASSPs, enabling DTV manufacturers to quickly develop digital displays that deliver an exceptional viewing experience. Spartan-6 FPGAs utilize integrated low-jitter spread spectrum clocking technology to easily achieve high performance and EMI targets. Spartan-6 FPGAs reduce power consumption by 50%, which not only simplifies thermal management and reduces total system cost, but also significantly improves system reliability. In addition, Spartan-6 FPGAs utilize a rich library of image enhancement IPs, including dynamic gamma correction, motion adaptive temporal noise suppression, and dynamic range compression, to improve picture quality. [page]

Xilinx Digital TV Targeted Design Platform
In the era of flat-panel displays, DTV manufacturers must be both very innovative and responsive. Although they have strong financial and technical resources to develop highly complex video algorithms, in today's increasingly competitive market, how to develop differentiated products with fewer resources, lower budgets and shorter time has become a huge challenge. At CES 2010, Xilinx will launch the first low-cost, low-power programmable platform optimized for developing the most advanced DTV solutions.

Xilinx consumer digital TV target design platform simplifies the integration of advanced video algorithms and the latest generation of digital interface standards, so that DTV OEM manufacturers can now have high-resolution image quality and differentiated features of consumer digital display products to market faster to meet customer needs. The functions of multiple ASSPs can be fully integrated into a single FPGA, which can not only reduce power consumption, save board space, improve cooling, and improve performance, but also reduce the bill of materials costs for various applications from standard LCD and PDP products to newer Organic LED (OLED) and 3DTV systems.

The integrated hardware and software platform is based on the next-generation programmable technology and intelligent design methodologies provided by the Spartan-6 FPGA Consumer Video Kit. The new Consumer Video Kit is the latest result of Xilinx's joint development with Tokyo Electron Device (TED), and fully integrates all the software, hardware, firmware building blocks and tools required to enable users to immediately start designing high-performance digital video systems, including a RoHS-compliant development board, soft IP supporting a variety of newly developed and de facto industry standard high-speed display interfaces, and ISE® Design Suite Embedded Edition software. Customizable targeted reference designs leverage these embedded Spartan-6 FPGAs to support DDR3 memory interfaces and power-optimized serial transceivers to improve the design, debug and integration efficiency of high-speed audio and video interfaces such as DisplayPort, V-by-One®HS, HDMI, PCI Express® and LVDS.

Supporting High Resolutions for Flat Panel Displays
Consumer electronics companies that produce flat panel or digital displays have been and continue to be major users of FPGAs. In fact, top OEMs have realized that the secret to ensuring market leadership in TVs is using low-cost Spartan FPGAs instead of ASSPs.

High-resolution video flat panel displays with dynamic backlight control:
Spartan-6 FPGAs enable developers to achieve higher image quality while reducing power and cost with scalable systems that support video/tuner functions and advanced flat panel display features. In addition, developers can connect integrated 3.125Gbps serial transceivers and high-performance MicroBlaze™ soft processors with optimized memory management units (MMUs) and floating-point units (FPUs) through the DisplayPort interface to achieve real-time dynamic backlight control.

Real-time algorithm evaluation: Leveraging the Spartan-6 FPGA Consumer Video Kit, this platform enables DTV designers to develop and evaluate image quality video algorithms in silicon in less time than traditional build times in ASSPs or ASICs. In addition, DTV designers can easily update systems with the latest video standards and proprietary algorithms throughout the product development and manufacturing cycle. Examples included with the design provide customers with best practices for compiling, debugging, and analyzing various Spartan-6 FPGA-based video applications and demonstrate how to customize designs for maximum end-product differentiation.

Differentiating in the digital consumer electronics field
In the consumer market, the average life of products was previously 3 to 5 years, but now it has been shortened to 1 year or even less. In this case, it is crucial to quickly launch products to the market. The uncertainty of product development in the consumer market, coupled with the changing preferences of end users and the rapid development of new video platforms and digital standards, requires us to achieve flexible changes throughout the product life cycle. Xilinx's new generation Spartan-6 FPGA and target design platform can meet the above design requirements, helping companies to do more with less resources, thereby reducing risks and achieving true differentiation, which is the key to winning in the digital consumer electronics field.