Xilinx Acquires NGCodec for Cloud Video Encoding IP and Talent
Xilinx, the San Jose-based programmable logic device company and inventor of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) announced it has acquired NGCodec for an undisclosed sum. NGCodec specializes in low-latency cloud video encoding, and uses FPGA acceleration to provide low-bitrate and high-quality live streams.
NGCodec supports H.265/HEVC and VP9, and will soon support H.264/AVC and AV1. It announced at the end of 2018 that Twitch is a customer for VP9 encoding.
The two companies have worked closely for year, and their offices are nearby (NGCodec's headquarters is in Sunnyvale, California). Xilinx has been a partner and strategic investor of NGCodec since 2016, and they've previously collaborated on next-generation FPGA-enabled video codec technology.
Xilinx chose to acquire NGCodec in order to gain valuable video IP and talent that will help it prove its value to customers. Cloud video is already a key driver for the company's data center group business, which it expects to grow by roughly 50% year-over-year through 2023.
With the sale now complete, the NGCodec team will report to Nazeem Noordeen, corporate vice president of data center engineering and Johan Janssen, senior director of compute video, working under Salil Raje, Xilinx’s executive vice president for the data center group.
Xilinx declined to discuss future products or technologies it will pursue following the acquisition.
Related Articles
The two new appliances, based on Alveo data center accelerator cards, use adaptable FPGA architecture to allow service providers to optimize quality and performance even after deployment
22 Jun 2020
Streaming Media's Jan Ozer and NGCodec's Oliver Gunasekara discuss NGCodec's live HEVC 4k60 encoder, and why the company was wrong about the future of H.264.
22 Apr 2019
NGcodec CEO Oliver Gunasekara talks about how his company uses field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) available on standard cloud computers to accelerate high-quality encoding of HEVC and VP9 video, and what this might mean for AV1.
17 Apr 2018