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Dolby Digital Professional Encoder Now Available on Xilinx FPGAs for High Performance, Low Power Audio Broadcast Applications

25th September 2009

Xilinx

ES Admin

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Xilinx, Inc. today announced that for the first time ever, multi-channel Dolby Digital professional encoding is available on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This capability has been implemented on Xilinx(R) Virtex(R)-5 devices, providing broadcast equipment developers with the flexibility to adapt to rapidly evolving design requirements for higher performance, lower power systems, and a simplified bill of materials to reduce costs.

Xilinx collaborated with Coreworks S.A., a leading provider of reconfigurable multimedia and communications intellectual property (IP) blocks, to port and certify the Dolby Digital 5.1 channel professional encoder in Virtex-5 FPGAs. This solution will also be provided on the latest generation of high performance Virtex-6 and low-power, low-cost Spartan(R)-6 FPGAs.

Live demonstrations of the first fully certified Dolby Digital Professional Encoder on Xilinx FPGAs are being held at the IBC2009 Exhibition in Amsterdam from September 11th through 15th in Xilinx Booth #10.B30.

Dolby Digital Professional Encoder on Xilinx FPGAs

Dolby Digital is one of the leading audio codecs, mandated in many standards and widely deployed in professional and consumer products worldwide. While FPGAs are commonly used in professional products for audio and video processing, until now Dolby Digital professional encoding was only licensed on conventional digital signal processing (DSP) devices. By making this capability available on Xilinx FPGAs, broadcast system developers have both the digital signal processing (DSP) technology and massive parallel processing capacity to handle multiple channels for even the most complex and demanding audio and video processing functions required by professional encoders, transcoders, decoders, cameras, switches and routers, and editing systems.

By offering Dolby Digital and other audio codec technology in our market-leading Virtex-5 FPGAs, we provide broadcast system developers with the unprecedented ability to perform extremely dense multi-channel encoding, decoding, and transcoding of audio and video together in a single design, said Mark Hoopes, senior manager, Broadcast Marketing at Xilinx. This provides a compelling market advantage for Xilinx customers, and we look forward to building on this foundation by enabling Dolby professional audio codecs on our new Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs.