HDMI/DVI Tx in Cyclone III family device

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The HDMI 1.3 spec has a maximum clock rate of 340 MHz with 3 data channels and 10 bits per channel, that gives you 10.2 Gbps. But that is at the highest resolution. If your maximum resolution is 720p, your clock will be 74.25 MHz for a total of 2.23 Gbps transfer, or 742.5 Mbps per lane. This is doable in the Cyclone 3.

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The Dedicated differential output buffers on side I/O banks support LVDS transmit at up to 840 Mbps. Is that is why you suggest that sending 720p frame is doable in Cyclone III?

Apart from that, I'm still a bit confused about I/O pin speed. The fpga specification give the throughput per pin, and not per channel/lane, right?

Another thing, the throughput that the specification gives depends upon the max frequency the fpga could support, right?

That's said, is it possible to calculate the min I/O pins speed I would need for example to use TMDS protocol for a given resolution?

Sorry for all of this confusion, but I'm rather beginner then an expert. I can't sleep at night trying to find answers for these questions.

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Yes you need a TDMS encoder, I'm not aware of any Altera core for this, but they do have some image processing cores, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have one. However the specification is available: http://www.ddwg.org/lib/dvi_10.pdf so it wouldn't be too hard to create it if you need it.

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I'm a FPGA/ASIC consultant with video and RF DSP experience, so if you need assistance implementing the design, we can help you out. We also have board design and software engineers on staff. If you are interested feel free to message me through this forum.

Regards,

Pete

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Thanks Pete for your detailed answer. I will contact u if i hear anything from my manager. There is also this encryption part in HDMI. Is it smthg i have to consider? We won't need any kind of encryption for this application.

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We need help with a MJPEG or H264 encoder that can handle 1080p @ 60Hz. If you think you can help us with that we can discuss further price and target technology. Footprint should be minimum for Cyclone III, EP3C10.