I'm going off topic, but I'm going to defend the move to FPGA. I think Stephan raises some valid points, but I disagree on the FPGA move. I'll also mention up front that I'm not impartial - I design FPGAs for a living.

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Originally posted by Stephan:
It requires a huge amount of processing power, since FPGAs are not very effective in comparison to ASICs.
You're going back a while there, Stephan. ASICs nowadays are just for high volume consumer stuff (even then only for when they can be amortised across multiple products). You can run FPGAs at 600MHz and have millions of gates available. MRI scanners and 4D ultrasounds use them for real time processing - if there's enough power for that, there's plenty for video processing. All the big telecomms boys have been developing mostly on FPGA for years for all their really powerful stuff, reserving ASICs for handsets where the functionality is fixed and volumes are in the millions. It's just not practical to develop high performance ASICs at 65nm unless you know you have a huge market. Mask costs are silly. It takes a year to design (at least), then another year to verify - how do you stay cutting edge with that? That's why I thing the Genesis tie up is so good for them - they get functionally verified code.

Application specific stuff like Genesis is great when you can share identical functionality across lots of devices, but you can't differentiate with a chip that everyone else has got. If Meridian are using FPGA, then that is a great strategic move. We're all used to software updates - now we'll get updated hardware as well.

The bottom line is that all but very few can afford to do latest process ASICs. In a gate for gate per-die comparison, FPGAs cost a fortune. In return you get real hardware future proofing and ludicrously high performance versus DSPs. At best ASICs are 50% faster - that can easily be overcome by paralleling stuff up.

If Meridian are swallowing the costs, then they're showing real commitment to their customers. It would be a lot cheaper to stick standard products in there.

Having said that - I've never seen inside their DVD players or processors, so I don't know how much FPGA is in there. Perhaps as you say they're working on a new one?

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