CAST Now a Certified Xilinx Alliance Partner

We've always supported both FPGA and ASIC designers, and in fact we were a charter member of the Xilinx AllianceCORE third-party IP program when they started it way back in 1997. 

Today you'll see an announcement from Xilinx about a revitalization of that program, and we're happy CAST is a part of this effort. 

The more stringent requirements for submitting IP to the program mean the cores you find there should perform well and work smoothly with Xilinx devices and technology. As Xilinx writes: 

CAST is a Certified Member of the Xilinx Alliance Program and has demonstrated qualified expertise on the latest Xilinx devices and implementation techniques on Xilinx programmable platforms. As a Certified Member, CAST has gone through a stringent certification process to ensure that our products and services are optimized to streamline customer product development cycles while minimizing risk.

All the cores we offer are available for Xilinx, and about 70 of them are certified for the new Alliance Program so far. That makes CAST the single largest provider of Alliance IP, another example of the extra steps we take to ensure your design success.

Meet Our New VP of Marketing

We're very pleased to announce our new Vice President of Marketing, Nikos D. Zervas.

You may already know Nikos as part of the extended CAST team: he was a 2001 co-founder and through August 2010 the Chairman and CEO of long-time CAST partner Alma Technologies in Greece, where he helped make real a vision of reusable IP for cutting-edge image and video compression solutions.

The innovative products Nikos helped define, develop, and bring to market through CAST include several significant milestones:

• the first JPEG 2000 core, in 2002,
• the first lossless LJPEG encoder and decoder and JPEG-LS cores, in 2005 and 2007 respectively,
• the first JPEG 2000 core compliant to the military Basic Image Interchange Format (BIIF), in 2009,
• the first encoder to support JPEG JPEG Scalado Speedtags, in 2008, and
• the first radiation-tolerant JPEG 2000 IC implementation, in 2010.

Besides this serious image and video technology experience, Nikos brings to CAST a vision for semiconductor IP that’s consistent with our own. Here’s a mini interview.

Why did you join CAST?

CAST has an industry reputation for being an IP vendor customers can really trust, with solid products and great support. Solving difficult technical challenges still excites me, of course, but my nine years working alongside CAST have shown me that having a passionate drive to help customers then earning the satisfaction of seeing those customers succeed can be just as rewarding.

When the opportunity rose to join the impressive team at CAST, help grow the company, and further the ideal of easier design through IP, it seemed like the right time in my career for just such a move.

What trends do you see for the IP market over the next year?

Design reuse was become accepted for reducing risk and minimizing time to market. With this acceptance—and the fast-increasing rates of design complexity growth and design cycle shrinkage—I believe designers will move beyond specific functional cores to seek broader IP systems and complete solutions, like CAST’s recent H.264 Reference Design System. I think CAST is well positioned to supply this need, and that I can help them succeed with this next stage of growth.

Nikos has a BA and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece. While pursuing his PhD, he published over forty papers in referenced journals and international conferences, and his work had more than 100 citations. He has been a reviewer for several conferences and journals, and received an award from the IEEE Computer Society for winning the Low-Power Design Contest at the 2000 IEEE Computer Elements Mesa Workshop.

Last year Nikos was elected as a member of the Board of Directors of the prestigious Hellenic Semiconductor Industry Association, where he is responsible for strategic planning. He is also a member of the IEEE, and the Technical Chamber of Greece.

Nikos will continue to live in Greece, with his wife (an air traffic controller) and two young children (a third is on the way!).

Please join us in welcoming Nikos to his new responsibilities at CAST.

With Great Ceremony, CARERI and CAST form Image/Video Lab in China

CARERI is the Chinese Aeronautical Radio Electronics Research Institute, a government-sponsored group focused on the research and development of integrated avionics system and its core equipment. CAST's Newton Abdalla recently visited their headquarters in Shanghai with our local partners S2C to sign a joint image and video IP agreement between CAST and CARERI.

The prestigious agreement creates the CAST IP Joint Lab, a physical lab space within the CARERI facility to be used for research and development on IP for video and image compression and transmission. To get the lab work going, CARERI licensed our new, hardware/software, ready-to-run, H.264 Reference Design System.

Part of the licensing agreement was that CAST participate in a formal signing ceremony in China. Newton made his way to CARERI headquarters with S2C's Lawrence Liang. Before arriving, Lawrence enhanced the signing gifts Newton brought—some very nice custom pens—with beautiful leather notebooks. The partnership and participating in the signing ceremony were already very important to us; this gift upgrade gave us a better sense of how important the symbols of the partnership are in doing business in China.

That ceremony with CARERI's president involved speeches on both sides in a room filled with flowers and Chinese and American flags, everybody wearing matching floral lapel sprays, and the unveiling of a large marble plaque commemorating the CARERI-CAST Joint IP Lab. Newton made out on the gift exchange, receiving for CAST an impressive traditional Chinese decoration.

We were honored to be part of the signing ceremony, but are even more excited about this great partnership and the work CARERI's engineers expect to do with our H.264 video encoder system.

If you're going to DAC, stop by our booth (#752) to see the system in live demonstrations.

News Alert: CAST Presenting at ChipEx2010 Israel

Woodcliff Lake, NJ, April 30, 2010 -- Semiconductor intellectual property (IP) provider CAST, Inc. will again participate in the ChipEx2010 conference and trade show in Israel, May 4, 2010.

CAST's VP of sales Meredith Lucky will be in exhibit Booth 55 to talk with engineers about the company's line of 100 IP cores and system IP products.

CAST's H.264 video and advanced JPEG image compression cores have been especially popular in Israel, and Lucky will be presenting "Choosing the Best IP for Compressing Images and Video" at 2:00 PM in the OpenStage Theater.

The presentation explains some of the algorithmic and hardware factors that should be understood when choosing compression IP cores, covering H.264, JPEG, JPEG 2000, and more. It also gives tips on evaluating image/video IP products and their suppliers. (See a preview of the presentation below.)

Also present at ChipEx will be Nikos Zervas, who heads one of the best data compression engineering teams in the world at Alma Technologies S.A. in Greece. Alma is a long-time CAST development partner, and CAST sells and supports Alma's image and video compression, encryption, and memory management IP cores.

Choosing the Best IP for Compressing Images & Video

View more presentations from CAST, Inc..

New I2S Audio Interface IP Core Great for High-Def Sound

Numerous customers have used our I²S interface core in a variety applications and products. Now we're offering an even better version from our development partners Evatronix, the I2S-SC.

The CAST S2C-SC supports all the modes in the Philips spec, but it's optimized to give better performance when processing the high-quality sound delivered with HD video and other popular sources.

Instead of eight separate channels, the new core uses just one channel, and employs Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to efficiently exploit that single channel for multi-channel data flow. Since most consumer devices use just one of the eight channels anyway, this approach is considerably more efficient.

I²S engineer and core developer Pawel Du says:

With the introduction of the TDM, we’re extending this one stereophonic channel into an orchestra of 16 channels, capable of delivering 192 kHz samples each. This is the equivalent of the state-of-the-art Dolby® TrueHD technology that is hitting the shelves on BluRay discs.

The I2S-SC is loaded with features, and an included tool makes it easy to configure them for the best match to your particular application.

If your project needs a high-quality audio interface, check out our new, second-generation core and save yourself some time.

Datasheet:
http://www.cast-inc.com/ip-cores/audio/i2s-sc/

Subsampling Explained

One of the first things we ask a new JPEG or H.264 customer about their requirements is: "What subsampling will you use?"

Many of them respond: "What's subsampling?" Here's a brief explanation.

Sampling is used to represent the Red, Blue, and Green (RBG) information defining each pixel in an image. In a group of 4 x 4 pixels, there are 16 Red samples, 16 Blue samples and 16 Green samples (48 total samples). This is called 4:4:4 format.

One technique for compressing image data is to switch the way an image is represented to a format that can more readily be subsampled.

For example, instead of using RGB, we can represent the exact same image information with values of luminance and chrominance. Luminance values are represented by Y, and chrominance by U and V. Hence this representation is called YUV format.

A perfect, lossless, transformation from RBG 4:4:4 to YUV 4:4:4 still uses the same abount of data for each pixel (16 samples for each channel). It turns out, though, that the human visual system is more sensitive to luminance than it is to chrominance.

We can exploit this fact to use fewer U and V samples -- subsampling -- but still keep the image looking pretty much the same to the human eye.

Three popular YUV subsampling schemes are 4:2:2 (24 samples), 4:2:0 (20 samples), and 4:1:1 (18 samples). They each require less data than the full 4:4:4 format, at the expense of discarding some of the image information (lossy compression). How far an image can be down-sampled and still look good depends on the nature of the image and the definition of "good" for the particular application.

Different compression algorithms work best with different image formats. So that's why one of our first questions as you consider our image and video compression IP cores is "What subsampling will you use?"

This also helps us understand if you might need something like our Color Space Converter core to get the best results in your system.

Richnex Achieves USB-IF Certification with our USB Hi-Speed OTG Controller

CAST mixed-signal IC design partner Richnex recently achieved USB-IF certification for a USB transceiver reference design using our USB Hi-Speed On-The-Go Controller Core.

Richnex worked together with our controller core development partner Evatronix to build the reference design system.

"RN1170 is the only USB High Speed Transceiver IC that features an integrated charge pump capable of supplying 100mA current. With a compact 5mm x 5mm QFN package, it is ideal for embedded host or OTG applications in portable devices. Our complete line up of USB transceiver products including different packages and feature set are USB-IF certified and proven to work flawlessly with the Evatronix High Speed USB OTG controller.” said Larry Huang, Sales & Marketing VP from Richnex Electronics Corporation.

Learn more about Richnex or their RN1170 USB 2.0 ULPI Transceiver with Integrated Charge Pump.