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NEC Display Solutions, Ltd.: Cinema Projectors

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Increasing integration (interfaces and SerDes in a single chip) reduces design costs and drives up performance.

NEC Display Solutions chose Xilinx FPGAs for three models of its DLP Cinema® Projectors. DLP Cinema projectors comply with the U.S. Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) standard, including a host of security features, and can adapt to a wide range of input signals.

The Xilinx devices reduce the design cost of peripheral devices by providing interfaces for all required standards (HD-SDI, 3G-SDI) plus serializer-deserializer (SerDes) in a single chip. Thus, the FPGA helps reduce overall system costs while enabling advanced performance, including communication via a high-speed Ethernet interface.

NEC Display Solutions used Xilinx FPGAs from the prototype-making stage of the DLP Cinema Project and for volume production. Xilinx FPGAs provide video interfaces with devices via four SDI I/O ports, gigabit Ethernet, and low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS); and high-speed interfaces compliant with several standards, including one for DDR2 memory. It uses the Xilinx Reference Design for the video process.

Sophisticated performance is required of projectors in this market segment, but since they are not mass-produced like consumer electronics products, we considered using FPGAs instead of ASICs right from the start, to achieve superior performance while keeping development costs down. A major factor that led us to select Xilinx FPGAs is that they offer a range of high-speed interfaces on a single chip, making superior performance possible at low cost. 

- Atsushi Kuroda, Head of Projector Development, NEC Display Solutions

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