(iTers News) – Although 4K TVs are buzzin their way through shops' and show rooms' floors, the market size still pales in comparision with an entire TV market.  For SoC chip makers, the market isn't big enough to recoup their heavy investments, too. Nor is the 4K TV standard for codec and other interfaces set. That's  where the forte  of FPGA, or field programmable gate array chips comes in. To cash in on the the 4K TV prototyping market, Altera Corporation will demonstrate its broadcast solutions at NAB 2014 to be held from April 7 to 10, 2014 in Las Vegas, showing attendees how to more effectively design high-end video cameras, encoders and other products that manage connectivity, compression and encoding applications for 4K video.

The demonstrations are based on Altera’s current high-end 28 nm ArriaV, StratixV, and its cost-effective Cyclone V FPGA families with a path to migrate to Altera’s 20 nm Arria 10, and Stratix 14 nm 10 FPGAs and SoCs.

Altera’s lead architects and partners will be on site to help discuss ways to handle the complexities of encoding and processing 4K by using specialty programmable logic devices, called FPGAs which can easily handle the 4X  bandwidth increase over today’s existing HD High Definition (HD) video solutions. Altera can also cover how to bring 4K systems to market now and how to future proof them for 8K. 

As broadcasters look to make live 4K mainstream, equipment makers are looking for new ways to handle the complexity and costs associated with 4K video systems design and processing. Altera’s portfolio is capable of meeting the complex technical 4K video processing and encoding applications for customers and offer a scalable solutions set with a migration path to future standards. Altera Stratix 10 solutions are based on the advanced Intel 14 nm Tri-Gate process, which provides end designers with performance, power, cost and time to market advantages.

Of special interest for the film and television industry, Altera distributor partner, Macnica Americas will be demonstrating a Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers’ solution known as or SMPTE 2022-1/2/5/6.

The demonstration offers a complete design for transporting video over an IP network exclusively on Altera FPGAs. The solution lowers the cost of video transport by leveraging Ethernet, so multiple video channels (up to 256) can be moved over a single cable reliably, with scalable resolution from sub-SD to 4K Ultra HD.  This demonstration showcases transport of uncompressed video as well as compressed JPEG2000 video over SMPTE 2022.