Verification of a single-chip Analog TV and Digital TV ASIC

Consumer entertainment products offer up many challenges for design and verification teams

By YJ Patil, Genesis Microchip Inc.
June 13, 2007 -- digitaltvdesignline.com

Consumer entertainment products offer up many challenges for design and verification teams. How do we integrate functions from multiple previous-generation products with new features? How much time can we save by taking advantage of verification reuse? Is a new verification technology or methodology needed to achieve the productivity required to meet complexity and project schedules? Choices that are made based on these important questions seriously affect product delivery and market success. In this article, I share with you a successful experience addressing such questions for our recent next-generation Analog TV and Digital TV ASIC.

Overview

High Definition TV (HDTV) ASICs need to be cost-efficient. They require tight integration of ATV and DTV solutions into an ASIC. Verification challenges include dealing with new interfaces, integrating modified blocks, and the ability to manage the huge set of test suites. Tight schedules and limited engineering and computing resources weigh heavily on these projects and they also need to be addressed.

Previous approaches simply relied on adding more engineering and computing resources which is not practical. Teams need to look at verification strategy, tools and methodology and how they better integrate across the enterprise. Let's take a closer look at our design illustrated below (figure 1).

The Genesis PrVIEW HD 300 Series IC (FLI103xx) is a single-chip TV solution for products requiring superior video quality in the analog and/or digital TV for ATSC, DVB, NTSC, OpenCable and PAL markets. This solution includes a single channel HD MPEG2 decoder, flexible analog front end with an integrated Faroudja' 3D Video Decoder, high performance industry standard 32-bit MIPS 4Kec processor (250 MIPS), multi-standard analog audio decoder, digital audio decoder and post processor, three programmable multimedia processing engines (MPE), advanced 2D graphics engine, integrated HDMI/DVI receivers with HDCP support, unified DDR memory controller and a very flexible and unique Video eXpansion Interface (VXI) providing glueless connectivity to Genesis video co-processors, or a customer's proprietary video processing chip.

Figure 1. The Design-Genesis FLI103XX

The solution includes next generation Faroudja DCDi Cinema' video format conversion, video enhancement and noise reduction. The level of video quality that could previously only be seen on an exclusive Faroudja Home Theater System is now available in a single-chip solution. The interfaces of the single chip ATV-DTV are also shown in Figure 1.