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Hdmi Connectors On Low-end Dev Boards.


hamster

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Hi!

 

I'm just playing around with a low cost board that has HDMI input and output on it. It would make a very valuable but low cost addition on the next Basys and or Nexys model, given that analogue VGA displays are very pretty soon going to disappear.

 

From the engineering point of view, Implementing DVI-D is a great way to experience the "pleasure" of high speed serial communications.

 

From the student/hobbyist point of view, playing with camera modules and image processing algorithms with 8-bit or 12-bit VGA output is quite lame.

 

From a purely aesthetic point of view, 24-bit colour images are so much nicer than low colour depths.

 

From a cost point of view, it is one connector and maybe a few passives, and 8 pins on the FPGA.

 

The only downside is that FPGAs don't have oodles of block RAM, and most low-cost high-capacity memory solutions (e.g. SDRAM) are relatively low bandwidth. This forces you have to process the data as it flows through the FPGA rather than bouncing frames in and out of memory of a frame buffer. 

 

Mike

 

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Hi Mike,

 

Thank you for the feedback!

 

As you probably know, we do offer a low cost board that has the HDMI I/O on it, the ZYBO-Zynq-7000 board, although I can't personally speak for how efficiently it is able to process the data with its on-board DDR3 memory. I don't know what the intentions are for the next Basys / Nexys models are in terms of a HDMI port, but I definitely think that would be a helpful asset since, as you say, there are multiple reasons why a digital port is much more appealing.

 

Thanks,

JColvin

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I can't say for sure because I don't know what I'm allowed to talk about, and I don't know what is actually in development, but there has been discussion about making more targeted lower end boards, such as a board specifically for video. I will ask and see what I can talk about. I agree that VGA is lame, and quite outdated. 

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