Mark Sauerwald and Bob Feng
National Semiconductor and Xilinx

Today's high-speed video system designers are faced with significant challenges in addressing both the digital IP and analog physical interface requirements of their products. Because digital and analog components often have very different requirements, supporting both fuctions in a single, ASSP chip often compromises the quality or cost-effectiveness of the solution. It can also be difficult to find a solution that has exactly the right IP and physical interface without waste in area or flexibility to meet the requirements of multiple standards.

A new chip set offered by National Semiconductor and Xilinx combines the best of the digital and analog worlds into one highly integrated solution. This paper introduces National Semiconductor's Serial Digital Interface (SDI) Smart SerDes combined with Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGAs and the Xilinx protocol stack—a high-performance, cost-effective solution for broadcast for Standard-Definition (SD), High-Definition (HD), and Three-Gigabit SDI (3G-SDI).