HYPHY’s Breakthrough Technology

Today’s digital information systems are largely based on design approaches from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that emphasized attaining 100% accurate repeatability of signal information. The objective of bit-perfect transmission for character-based information was an absolute requirement; however, at that time the transmission of video information was not contemplated.

Fast-forward to today where over 82% of internet traffic is video! Consumer demand and ever-higher frame rates and resolutions continue to drive the need for massive amounts of video distribution, and the transmission of all this digital video information is placing huge demands on the associated hardware. In response, video compression has increasingly become the default strategy as a means to bridge the gap between throughput requirements and hardware cost and capability. However, even with compression, digital video transmission is becoming increasingly inefficient and unsustainable as frame rates and resolutions increase.

But there is a new and better way

HYPHY has invented a breakthrough video transport technology called Spread Spectrum Video Transport (SSVT^TM). SSVT uses encoded, clocked analog video samples to achieve at least 10x video throughput over any electromagnetic pathway, while achieving visually lossless performance and higher color depth. SSVT also achieves other benefits including: negligible latency, lower power requirements, low EME emissions and high EMI resistance. Prototype implementations of HYPHY’s SSVT have demonstrated the ability to transmit 4K60 video over hundreds of meters of passive Cat6 UTP cable.

While SSVT is applicable for a wide variety of markets and applications, HYPHY has chosen display driver integrated circuit (IC) solutions as the market entry point for SSVT, and is currently collaborating with display panel and IC manufacturers to bring to market new timing controller and source driver chips that leverage SSVT technology.  With the advantages that SSVT brings to the display, HYPHY is working to enable large, high resolution 8K display panels and 4K576 gaming displays with dramatically fewer source drivers and reduced manufacturing complexity, while improving visual performance and refresh rates.

Further applications of SSVT include improving video transport within smaller display panels, such as laptops, tablets and mobile devices, with the added bonus of SSVT’s 10x greater throughput advantage translating into extended battery life. In addition, SSVT can be utilized for long-distance video cables, camera sensor-to-image processors, and wireless video systems. It is also ideally suited to provide AI (machine learning) systems with more highly detailed video information at much lower latency than is achievable using existing digital video technology. This immediacy of feedback to the operating system from its external sensors would provide a noticeable advantage in real-time tracking and guidance processes, with obvious applications in the automotive and defense industries.

What is SSVT?

The principle of spread spectrum signal transmission has been known and used for over 70 years in the fields of telecommunications and radio communications. By spreading a unique signal across a wide frequency domain, its bandwidth is increased, making it more resistant to interference and fading. HYPHY’s SSVT is a new video transport technology, designed from the ground up, to capture and transport rich video information through the use of innovative spread spectrum modulation methods. This process is used to encode analog representations of video information using multiple channels of orthogonal signals.

In the operation of a display panel, video information must be transported to the display glass – an analog environment, with source driver capacitors and pixels all creating signal imperfections. To represent one brightness level, an 8-bit number is sent, which indicates one of 256 levels between min and max. In addition, it is necessary to send an extra 2 bits containing clock and synchronization information. This enables precise reconstruction of the transmitted signal. After its digital transmission using 10 physical energy packets, the number is reconstructed precisely in order to drive the thin-film transistor (TFT) source capacitors. In contrast, HYPHY’s SSVT can achieve the same result by sending a single voltage, achieving greater dynamic range and reducing physical cost. This translates to a 10X product throughput advantage over existing methods!

SSVT uses spread spectrum direct sequence modulation techniques – spreading the signal to gain resiliency, and the subsequent orthogonalization of the spreading sequence into multiple lower bandwidth “tracks”, in order to regain the bandwidth lost by spreading. Furthermore, SSVT operates as an analog amplitude transport mechanism that can transport an analog signal robustly due to the resiliency afforded by the spreading aspects of the waveform. One final factor to consider is that bit-perfect transmission is not necessary for video applications. SSVT allows a graceful degradation in signal quality that the human eye is less likely to notice once imperfections accumulate.