Xilinx Solution Summary

The digital revolution has led to a new range of digital consumer devices such as digital television, DVD, set-top boxes, digital camera's, digital VCR's and HDTV (high definition television). All of these devices require a vast amount of data at very high speeds. To insure a very high level of efficiency, this data is needs to compressed with minimal loss of quality. DCT/IDCT is used as the base coding scheme in many multimedia compression standards such as JPEG, MPEG, Dolby AC2 & AC3 etc. DCT/IDCT is very compute intensive and is typically performed using a microprocessor. However, using a low cost Spartan-II FPGA and the DCT/IDCT core from Xentec, this function can be performed 180 times faster than a 32-bit mainstream processor operating at 266MHz. This eliminates the need for a high-performance processor to perform data compression and allows the use of a more cost effective processor and still significantly improves system performance.