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At last week’s CES in Las Vegas, the company introduced its first design platform aimed specifically at digital television embedded systems.

This is another step in the chip supplier’s plan to make the decision to start an FPGA design less intimidating.

To support this, the FPGA supplier has introduced a range of “out-of-the-box” development kits for its Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 device families.

“Our aim is to make FPGA design less intimidating,” said Brent Przybus, product marketing director at Xilinx.

According to Xilinx, the functions of a number of application-specific standard products can be designed into a single Spartan-6 device with the integrated hardware and software platform.

Target applications include standard LCD, plasma, organic LED (OLED) and 3DTV systems.

“While digital TV suppliers have the financial and intellectual resources to produce sophisticated video algorithms, they are being challenged to differentiate products in an increasingly competitive marketplace with fewer resources, smaller budgets, and tighter schedules,” said Harry Raftopoulos, director of consumer segment marketing at Xilinx. 

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The promotion of Spartan-6 based designs using the design platform follows the wider use of earlier FPGAs in DTV applications.

The design platform was developed in collaboration with Tokyo Electron Device (TED).

It is a scalable hardware and software design which includes a Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA base board along with several daughter cards based on the industry-standard FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) specification, soft IP from Xilinx and TED supporting display interfaces.