Xilinx and Coreworks Deliver Wide Range of Professional Audio Codecs, Including Dolby, for Easy Implementation With FPGAs

Consumers increasingly want surround sound on a wide variety of entertainment platforms including TV, video over IP, and in video games, said Jose T. de Sousa, President of Coreworks. These new CODECs are optimized for Xilinx FPGAs so that broadcast equipment manufacturers can keep up with a fast paced market as they deliver solutions to content providers and producers.

Coreworks designed the new IP cores to fully support Dolby Digital, AAC+ and MPEG-1 Layer II for distribution to the home and Dolby E from professional studio to studio. This support helps designers exploit the parallel processing capabilities of FPGAs for more performance, while lowering bill of material costs through reduced board component count.

Prior to the development of these cores, all Dolby sound encoding and decoding hardware implementation was available only on DSPs, said Dean Westman, Vice President, Communications Business at Xilinx. For OEMs working to meet the needs of professional audio encoding and decoding with very high channel counts, the new FPGA-compliant codecs offer reduced power consumption, increased device density, reduced cost and a simplified bill of materials.