On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 12:44:19AM -0500, Sam O'nella wrote:
I haven't built or marketed anything myself but i
believe if i understood
?correctly from several folks who have that vga was a cheaper choice due to
licensing costs for dvi or hdmi at the time.?
Parts of DVI are patented, but there are royalty-free licences available. It's
also fairly like that the patents have all bit expired, or are invalid. HDMI
can be treated as DVI with a different plug.
I doubt supporting either interface would be a problem on licensing grounds. If
nothing else, these things aren't made in high enough volume to attract the
attention of the attack lawyers.
Not sure if vga is past that point or open but when
keeping home brew kits
cheap for us hobbyists every dollar counts.
This is the more likely reason: DVI and related standards use TMDS signalling
which requires a reasonably complex logic block running at a minimum of 250MHz
to scramble and multiplex the 24 bit RGB into the four output signals. This is
not impossible on low-end FPGAs, but it does eat enough LEs that the designer
may decide to just support VGA rather than cut back functionality elsewhere or
require a more expensive FPGA.