FPGAs bring clarity to new visibility enhancement technology platform

Demonstrating the advanced innovation enabled by low-power, single-chip FPGA technology, Actel has announced that LYYN AB, a Swedish company specializing in video enhancement, has developed a hardware and software video processing platform enabled by the Actel ProASIC3 family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

The solution "cleans" video footage to provide better visibility in the presence of such things as snow, fog, underwater silt, and darkness. LYYN's products are targeted for use in remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and aircrafts (UAVs) as well as portable devices, such as underwater cameras and advanced surveillance systems.

"Our innovative platform is the result of more than 30 years of research into the human vision system," said Andreas Ekengren, managing director of LYYN. "As a result, we needed an FPGA solution with uncompromising security to protect our crown jewels, as well as the speed needed to process video footage in real-time. Actel's FPGAs not only delivered the security and speed we needed, but also uniquely offered a single-chip, low-power solution to enable entirely new portable products based on our technology."

ProASIC 3: Security, speed, and low power
LYYN's Visibility Enhancement Technology (VET) leverages a patent-pending algorithm, which is safely stored on an Actel ProASIC3 FPGA using inherently secure flash memory and 128-bit AES decryption.

In addition to speed and advanced security, ProASIC3 FPGAs deliver market-leading typical stand-by power consumption of only 8 mA, enabling three times longer battery life on average when compared to alternative solutions. ProASIC3 FPGAs also integrate flash memory on-chip and can therefore meet the Level-0 live at power-up (LAPU) specification. This means they are operational between power-on and power-up and can offer up to 4,000 times better power-on response time than competing SRAM-based FPGAs.

"Our focus on delivering the industry's lowest power FPGAs is enabling entirely new product categories such as the solutions in development at LYYN," said Rich Brossart, vice president of product marketing at Actel. "Competing FPGA technologies have been incapable of combining security with low power in a single-chip device, forcing customers to rely on much more complex and expensive ASIC solutions. Actel has broken through the traditional power barriers associated with FPGA technology."

Pricing and availability
LYYN offers the T38, a stand-alone visibility enhancement technology unit for analog video, for $5,195. The A3P1000 and the ARM7-ready M7A3P1000 are offered in FG144, FG256, FG484 and PQ208 packages. The A3P1000 and M7A3P1000 are currently sampling. The A3P1000 is priced at less than $9.95 in 250K-unit quantities.