SMPTE ST 2110 Compliant Scalable Architecture on FPGA for end to end Uncompressed Professional Video Transport Over IP Networks

SMTPE ST 2110 is a professional video over IP standard which enables uncompressed video to be transported as separate video, audio and ancillary data streams, allowing true flexibility in media workflows. Uncompressed video transmission allows professional video environments to achieve high quality video distribution while meeting strict latency requirements. Although this standard can be implemented on software, hardware solutions can achieve superior performance, lower latency and lower power consumption while efficiently handling jitter and packet bursts. This paper presents an FPGA based hardware implementation of a SMPTE ST 2110 compliant end to end solution supporting uncompressed video resolutions of up to 4K at 30fps. Due to its scalability, the architecture can be easily extended to support higher video resolutions and/or multiple video streams. Additionally, the interface modularity of the architecture enables integration with any video interface type. In this work, a Serial Digital Interface (SDI) interface is used. The proposed architecture consists of a replicable video processing pipeline for each stream, a Session Description Protocol (SDP) compliant network configuration unit and a SMPTE ST 2059-1/2 compliant time synchronization unit common to all streams, with network access via a 10G UDP/IPv4/Ethernet stack. All modules other than the Ethernet core and SDI interface modules can operate at 200MHz even though 4K 30fps video processing can be achieved with a minimum operating frequency of 100MHz.