TI Da Vinci series Video Processor

Video is everywhere! There is a video camera in everybody's mobile phone! Well, almost. security devices like video doorbell, remote monitoring use video. So, there's a need for processing video at most unlikely places. You also need to be able to do it with minimal real estate on the device circuit board. With fast changes happening on the video technology, H.264 in MPEG4 becoming so common, you need devices capable of processing that. With HD and the push to get 1080p video everywhere, processing loads are enormous.

Texas Instrument has developed a family of devices that are pushing the frontier in video processing with SoC, systems on chip in a family of devices in their signal processing chips devices. TMS320 DM xxx are the typical part numbers in the family. DM standing for digital media applications.

One such recent device is the TMS 320DM365. This page has a download link for the data sheet. Take a look to familarize yourself with what a device like these may contain. The 365 device has 3 variations the 216, 270 and the 300 MHz devices.

Beside the CPU, which is a ARM9 RISC processor, these devices have video processing hardware support and some accelerators for typical functions. Such functionality on these devices include video resizer, on screen display (OSD), previewer and hardware statistics collection module. Tow co-processors off load a lot of video processing from the main CPU. They make the video codecs available to your application including the H.264.  Interface for analog cameras ease applications using analog video out cameras. The block diagram in two parts below will give you a quick look into the kind of resources available on the SoC.