“Governments and businesses are increasingly using video surveillance as a public safety and asset-protection tool, which is driving demand for higher performance digital video recording systems and better video quality,” said Bernd Lienhard, senior vice president and general manager of Conexant’s Imaging and PC Media business. “Manufacturers are hastening to capitalize on this growing market opportunity, and require advanced semiconductor solutions that allow them to develop cost-effective, differentiated solutions. Our new media bridges deliver the performance, flexibility, and value our customers require to capture share in this increasingly competitive marketplace.”
Conexant’s media bridges are the newest offering in a family of products that the company has developed specifically for video surveillance applications. The CX25820 and CX25821 are based on a flexible architecture, and are offered with integrated bi-directional video and audio interfaces. The devices can bridge multiple ITU-R BT.656/VIP2.0 video and Inter-IC Sound (I2S) audio streams over PCIe simultaneously. For transfers originating at the host, the video interfaces can be configured in a “data-pump” mode that allows generic 8- or 16-bit data to be transferred to the add-in card. The devices can also be configured to interface with certain advanced H.264 video compression codecs, which allows compressed data to be transferred efficiently from add-in cards to the host processor.
Key video surveillance-specific features include programmable logic, which can be used to detect motion on incoming, industry-standard BT.656/VIP2.0 video streams. When this occurs, an alert is immediately sent to the host processor via the PCIe bus. The CX25820/1 media bridges also have the ability to downscale digital video from 4:2:2 format to 4:1:1, reducing the bandwidth from 16 to 12 bits per pixel. This increases the number of uncompressed video streams that can be sent over the PCIe bus.
CX25820 and CX25821 Feature Comparison Chart |
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Features |
CX25820 |
CX25821 | |
Number of Video Interfaces | 6 | 10 | |
Number of Stereo Audio Interfaces (I2S) | 3 | 5 | |
GPIOs | 48 | 48 | |
I 2 C | 3 | 3 |