Xilinx and Image Processing Techniques Announce New Advanced Video Development Platform

The industry’s first platform to bridge Dual Link or 3G-SDI to PCI Express for broadcast and cinema quality video processing on the PC

LAS VEGAS, April 16, 2007 – At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference today, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX), the world’s leading programmable logic supplier, and Image Processing Techniques, Ltd., a consultancy company specializing in the design and development of equipment for the professional broadcast, post production, and image analysis industries, launched a new Advanced Video Development Platform (AVDP) based on the PCI Express® compliant endpoint block embedded in Xilinx Virtex™-5 LXT and SXT FPGAs.  Designers of post production equipment, video servers, and encoders to broadcast monitors are expected to benefit from the high-performance, flexible, and scaleable solution. Xilinx will demonstrate the AVDP and associated IP at this week’s NAB, April 16-19, Booth # SU14609, South Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The platform supports SDI, HD-SDI, Dual Link SDI, 3G-SDI and DVB-ASI connectivity via a daughter card option, enabling the streaming of broadcast and digital cinema quality video to and from a standard PC motherboard and associated hard drive through a PCIe® 1x/4x interface. Image Processing Techniques (IPT) also provides VHDL source code IP for key video building blocks: a 2-D resizer/scaler which supports high quality conversion from SD to HD and cinema resolutions; a motion adaptive deinterlacer to present progressive scan images to flat panel displays; and the DMA control used for managing high bandwidth data across the PCI Express interface.

“This solution is in response to overwhelming customer demand for a cost-effective, flexible, high-performance video processing solution that provides uncompressed video connectivity to the PC while allowing designers to add their own value-add enhancements to commonly used video algorithms.” said Paolo Masini, senior manager of Broadcast Vertical Marketing at Xilinx. “By working closely with IPT on this platform, we are able to leverage their experience in broadcast and post production, and support them in bringing a product to market that will address many of the issues facing broadcasters today.”

“We believe the combination of ratio multipliers, memory, logic, and high speed serial transceivers on the Virtex-5 LXT and SXT devices offer the broadcast industry an ideal solution to enable high-quality video processing applications.  This solution provides users a greater degree of flexibility during development, and the option to move the platform straight into production, resulting in much faster time-to-market,” said Roger Fawcett, business director at Image Processing Techniques.

Availability
The AVDP, including the scaler, deinterlacer, combiner, PCI Express compliant DMA and memory control, software drivers and GUI, and documentation is now available for purchase from Image Processing Techniques.  The list price ranges from $3,600 to $6,800. For more details, please contact IPT at sales@imageproc.com or your local Xilinx sales representative or distributor.

About Image Processing Techniques
Image Processing Techniques Ltd. is a consultancy company specializing in the design and development of equipment for the professional broadcast, post production and image analysis industries. IPT also manufactures the OmniTek range of advanced PC-based test and measurement systems, which are in use worldwide for the generation, monitoring and analysis of broadcast TV signals.

About Xilinx in Broadcast
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in programmable logic solutions offering a wide array of solutions for the broadcast industry, ranging from video, audio and network connectivity, real-time HD video processing and high speed DSP for transmission and modulation. Xilinx offers reference designs and IP cores as building blocks for complete broadcast systems.  For more information, visit www.xilinx.com/broadcast.

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.