SDI on Lattice

The Lattice Nexus platform offers a combination of advantages that allow these FPGAs to address efficiently a number of difficult applications, especially in the small footprint + low power + low cost constraints.

We have successfully ported our SDI to this platform and addressed a challenging application.

For a customer’s project, we had to design an interface between an SDI color camera and a battery-powered system we designed for an IR sensor, fitting inside a very small PCB. Some video processing also needed to fit in the FPGA, and indeed the power budget needed to be as low as possible.

We found that a Lattice CertusPro NX could be a nice fit.
But the SERDES Supported Standards table (page 55) doesn’t include SDI.
After exchanging and getting help from the Lattice Engineering team, we had very good hopes and we decided to port and test our SDI IP on the CertusProNx.

The port went well : all our tests have passed with flying colors, and this bridge runs at a very low power. This FPGA and our IPs were an efficient combination to solve a challenging problem and offer a lot of flexibility.

We will demonstrate this IP on our future ALSE CertusProNx Development kit that will be announced and available in September.