Altera and Gennum Develop 3 Gbps Video Interface for Coax

Altera and Gennum, a silicon company based in Burlington, Ontario, announced a serial video interface that supports a 3-Gbps signal over a coax. The solution uses Altera's Stratix GX FPGAs and Gennum's cable equalizer and driver products. This enables a multi-rate link that supports Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) protocols 259M-C (270 Mbps) and 292M (1.485 Gbps), and twice the SMPTE 292M data rate (2.970 Gbps).


"The movement in the broadcast industry toward 1080-line progressive video formats is creating demand for a 3 Gbps serial interface," said Alan Ferguson, director, video transport products at Gennum. "Copper is still the lowest cost method of transporting digital video, so the industry will be pleased to learn that 100 meters of coax is possible at 3 Gbps."


The companies will demonstrate the 3 Gbps link (two times the 292M SMPTE specification for high definition serial video) over 100 meter Belden 1694A cable at next week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference in Las Vegas.
http://www.altera.com/http://www.gennum.com/