High-density FIFO for camera control unit and base station

Cypress Semiconductor has announced that Ikegami Tsushinki Corp., the world's leading manufacturer of advanced high-definition (HD) cameras and production equipment, has selected Cypress's high-density First-In, First-Out (FIFO) memory for its 3G-ready fibre transmission camera control unit and base station. Ikegami chose Cypress's CYF0072 SRAM-based high-density FIFO for its ability to buffer HD video frames with enhanced signal integrity. Cypress's 72-Mb video frame buffer solution operates as a FIFO with independent read and write ports for fast data transfer. The solution is an effective alternative to standard DRAM-based FIFO memories because of its high density, lower power consumption and heat dissipation, smaller footprint and lower cost. The simple SRAM-based interface reduces implementation and debugging effort, improves time-to-market, and reduces engineering costs. Ikegami's CCU-980 camera control unit and BS-98 base station are used with the company's full digital 3G HDTV portable camera system for live television broadcasts. The systems leverage the Cypress FIFO solution to buffer HD images for progressive-to-interlaced and interlaced-to-progressive conversion, perform frame synchronization with variable delay buffering, and enable sophisticated filtering operations via programmable flags and write-mask and read-skip features. "We are pleased that Ikegami has selected our 72-Mb FIFO for their newest 3G-enabled camera control unit and base station," said Sunil Thamaran, senior business unit director for specialty memories, Cypress. "High-definition video is a booming market and our SRAM-based FIFOs provide an ideal solution to ensure signal integrity for these HD broadcast applications, positioning us for continued success in the video imaging segment." Cypress's 72-Mb FIFO delivers enhanced signal integrity and operates at frequencies up to 133MHz with throughput up to 4.8Gbps - commonly required for buffering video frames. With the ability to operate in any system that needs buffering at high speeds across different clock domains, the video frame buffers are ideal for a wide range of video and image processing applications, including picture-in-picture and interlacing in HD cameras, scan rate conversion in broadcast equipment, image scanning and enhancement in medical equipment, and radar and sonar defence systems.