C6A8168 vs. DM8168

Sy Tran said:

Is C6A8168 architecture and peripherals the same as the DM8168? Particularly I am interested in the video ports and package pinout, are they compatible? 

The devices are pin compatible, so development on C6A816x is easily migrated to the DM816x, the big difference is the video accelerators present on the DM816x (capable of 3x 1080p60 channels of compression) whereas the C6A816x has only the DSP core for acceleration.

Sy Tran said:

Can I layout the PCBA for the C6A8168 and do software development on the C6A8168 then later on use the DM8168 as a drop in replacement pin to pin and code compatible to lower the power consumption?

While they are pin compatible, the DM8168 is not particularly lower power than the C6A8168, especially if you are using the DM8168 HDVICP accelerators which would typically make it a higher power part given the same frequencies.

Bernie,

Thank you for the clarification. I don't have a need video compression yet but in the future I might. I do have needs for image processing (image warping, HDR, color enhancement, fusion) with delay less than one frame.  I think much of image processing features I need are not in the HDVICP, so I am relying on the 1.5 GHz DSP to do the work. Nevertheless, my thoughts now are to use the fastest DSP on DM8168 as the start. Put the HDVIP accelerators in sleep mode to lower the power consumption. This will give me multiple options to add features in the future without changing the BOM.

Regards,