A reconfigurable hardware platform for digital real-time signal processing in television studios

By the continuous increase of speed and capacity of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) it becomes possible not only to process digital video data by FPGAs in real-time but also to implement the logic of complex video algorithms in one FPGA. For television (TV) studios the adherence to the real-time constraint is a mandatory requirement. Besides the reconfigurability of FPGAs allows the execution of different algorithms on the same hardware. With the reconfigurable hardware platform introduced in this contribution different video standards including high definition television (HDTV) can be processed in real-time. To realize a system with many complex video applications the platforms can be cascaded.