4K resolution is the next major enhancement in video because of the benefits in picture clarity and realism. Many leading projector, broadcast, and camera manufacturers are shipping 4K enabled systems. Altera enables this next generation format conversion by reducing the system device count, which lowers the overall costs, reduces the cost of development, and simplifies board design. Previous systems required as many as nine off-the-shelf devices to perform 4K format conversion—four 1080p format conversion devices and five devices for serial digital interface (SDI) input and output.

This application note describes a 4K format conversion reference design.The 4K format conversion reference design uses less than 33% of a single Altera Stratix IV EP4SGX230 FPGA. With migration paths to any Altera FPGA device families, you can integrate these functions with ample headroom remaining to incorporate other video functionality and interfaces such as DisplayPort and video compression (encoding or decoding) processing.