Latin American transmitter company chooses FPGAs

Linear's latest modulator leverages the 500MHz XtremeDSP slices in the Virtex-4 FPGA fabric to achieve higher levels of performance while significantly reducing power consumption.

Linear Equipamentos Electronicos has chosen Xilinx Virtex-4 SX field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to enable its latest digital TV (DTV) modulator.

Linear has developed the industry's first modulator for the International System for Digital Television (ISDTV) market allowing customers to quickly adapt to the new and emerging standard.

Xilinx has been actively involved in supporting the development of the Brazilian DTV standard since April of 2004, with support of academia, government, and commercial customers along the way.

These efforts have helped Linear achieve the first shipping modulator for the ISDTV market.

Linear's latest modulator leverages the 500MHz XtremeDSP slices in the Virtex-4 FPGA fabric to achieve higher levels of performance while significantly reducing power consumption.

In addition, the XtremeDSP slices can be cascaded and operated at full system speed.

"Xilinx is well established to meet the requirements of the evolving broadcast industry.

Its product, services and academia-based engagement in Latin America make the company a key partner in our product development", said Vanessa Lima, RandD Manager at Linear.

"The high-performance DSP capabilities and field programmability of the Xilinx Virtex-4 SX devices provide our system the flexibility to meet customer requirements and our time to market objectives simultaneously".

"The broadcast systems industry is booming and Linear is taking the lead to develop digital TV systems that will quickly be adopted across borders", said Greg Cole, Director of Business Development and Sales for South America at Xilinx.

"The combination of parallel processing performance on a continuously flexible hardware platform is a perfect solution for developing high-performance DSP co-processing solutions".

"Add to this the DSP-optimised architecture, resources and design environment of the Virtex-4 SX family, and designers have the most powerful, cost-effective DSP design platform ever produced".

Xilinx Virtex-4 SX devices are optimised for very high-performance signal processing applications such as wireless communication, video, multimedia and advanced audio.

In addition to providing high DSP performance, Xilinx Virtex-4 SX devices employ a micropower architecture that reduces power consumption to 2.3mW/100MHz (typical) per DSP slice.

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