video
I am looking for any chip that I can use to display video at a high resolution (at least 720p). There is no need for
I know of the Blackfin processors, but they are all BGA.
The PIC24FJ256DA210 is capable of only 640 x 480 sadly.
I am guessing that FPGA's are the last option that I have in this situation, but am more curious about anything that would require me to do less work than having to make the entire video system on an FPGA.
The Spartan 6 FPGA certainly can drive HDMI/DVI signals directly, demonstrated in the Atlys board. I've personally driven 1920x1200 VGA from a Spartan 3A starter kit, but the signal wasn't very clean then. You're looking at very high bandwidth signals, however, so the boards must be designed carefully.
If this is for a single hobbyist build, you might be better off using a premade graphics card with its own framebuffer, for instance a USB one. DisplayLink comes to mind.
It used to be possible to get these little modulator units that took NTSC video in, and would put out a signal on channel 3 or 4. Not sure if you can still get those, they were common in early 80's 8-bit micros, back when nobody could afford actual monitors, and would let your computer drive a TV. With the demise of analog broadcasting, they probably aren't manufactured anymore, but you might liberate one from a defunct VHS machine. Curiously, a quick search reveals all manner of consumer productized ones available, which might work for you, too. The things I'm talking about look like so:
Anyway, one of those modulators, an NTSC camera module, and perhaps a bit of amplification (about 72MHz ?) and you'd have your own low power analog TV transmitter. And by low power, I mean RF, not battery draw. You'd probably get plenty of range on 0.1W to 0.5W of RF output. This might not even incur the wrath of the FCC until they get around to re-assigning the former analog TV channels.
Best Answer
Nearly all CPUs are not directly capable of producing video -- some other piece of hardware (typically using a DMA engine) fetches data from main memory or video memory and displays it.
Some of the few CPUs that are capable of directly producing video include:
As far as I know, the only 32-bit CPU currently manufactured in a DIP package is the Parallax Propeller. The Propeller, unlike most CPUs, has built-in hardware to support VGA video generation. I see that several different Propeller boards support 1024x768 bitmap graphics http://www.parallax.com/tabid/252/Default.aspx
Chuck Moore's F21, i21, and MuP21 CPUs, unlike most CPUs, have built-in hardware to support VGA graphics.