Digital Video Processor

Stephen Edwards

For my senior project at Caltech, I built a digital video processor capable of displaying real-time color video on the sides of spinning cube.

My final report on the video processor contains a theory of operation, a description of its capabilities, and a discussion of the problems I encountered while building it.

I used Quinn Jensen's a56 public domain DSP56001 assembler to develop the software for this project.

Block Diagram

The main subsystems are

A Phillips SAA9091 Digital Multi-Standard Decoder that digitizes color analog video
A bank of 12 256K x 4 VRAMs that stores two full-color frames
A Motorola DSP56001 Digital Signal Processor that controls the flow of video into the framebuffers
A Phillips SAA7192 Digital Color-Space Converter coupled with a Brooktree Bt101 Video DAC that drives an analog RGB monitor

Schematic Diagrams

6 pages of schematics in PDF format.

The systemwide timing diagram is also available.

Last updated 20010726