Lattice HDMI Video Interface

The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is an industry standard for transmitting both uncompressed digital video and multi-channel audio over a single connector and cable. It is primarily used for transmitting high-speed audio/video content to home entertainment systems and computers. It has become a de-facto standard for TVs and is commonly found in LCD monitors as well. HDMI is backward compatible with DVI. Therefore, when a DVI to HDMI adapter is used, no signal conversion is required, nor is there a loss of video quality.

The high-speed HDMI standard uses three source synchronous serial data channels and a clock channel for data transfer. It leverages Transition Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) to transmit and receive data with low interference. Ten data bits are transmitted for every clock period. The Lattice FPGAs based HDMI receivers tune to the reference clock frequency automatically and allow customers to integrate video processing functionality on the same device.

The Lattice FPGA based HDMI solutions are ideal for applications where customers need to extract and process audio, video, and data streams from multiple feeds and recombine them for a new unified view. One such application is a Video Conferencing Switch as illustrated in the following picture. In a Video Conferencing Switch, multiple audiovisual feeds are received from which different audio, video, and data streams are extracted. The system then reconstructs a unified view with multiple participants and adapts it for various kinds of displays. All such multimedia processing functions can be easily performed using the versatile and economical LatticeECP3 FPGAs.

To expedite the design of HDMI based video display interfaces, Lattice offers an extensive portfolio of Silicon Device IP Cores, Reference Designs, Evaluation Boards, Design Examples, and Documentation.