Review

Advances in digital signal processing, data compression, and various other compute-intensive technologies are ushering in graphics, video and audio boards that are finding their way into a steadily expanding range of industrial, medical, entertainment, surveillance, military and other applications. Many of the boards we reported on are of the PCI variety, but as you might expect, PMC, VME, PCI/PXI and PC/104 cards are also in the mix, as well as modular components.

For frame grabbing applications, Sensoray (sensoray. com) has integrated onto a single PCI card the functionality of a 16 x 4 video crosspoint switch, frame grabber, JPEG compression, and digital I/O. For interlaced NTSC, frame capture rate is 30 fps and for PAL, 25 fps. Four on-board decoders minimize the Model 617 frame grabber's channel-to-channel switching delays, and a text-overlay buffer accommodates annotation and uncompressed frames for external motion detection.

Control for LCD monitors from 6.4" to 30" in size is provided by the Prisma, an a/d RGB controller board that accommodates standard LCD resolutions and interface types. Standard interfaces include TTL, single and dual LVDS, and TMDS. The board also offers options for DVI, composite, and S-Video interfaces. The 150 x 110-mm board is made by Apollo Display Technologies (apollodisplays.com) and comes in kit form with LCD panel, matching backlight inverter, and all cables.

Exploiting Silicon Motion's 128-bit SM731 graphics accelerator, the conduction-cooled Duros/PMC is a ruggedized, IEEE P1383.1-compliant PMC graphics board for use in VMEbus and CompactPCI embedded systems. The Peritek (peritek.com) board supports screen resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200 at vertical scan rates up to 91 Hz, with the SM731 supported by 16 MB of SDRAM. The board can also deliver single-channel analog VGA, single-channel DVI as an option, or dual-channel LVDS outputs. Software support is via the Standard Drawing Library for VxWorks and Linux, WindML for VxWorks, XFree86 X Windows for Linux, and Windows 2000/XP with OpenGL and DirectX support.

The Heron DSP system from Traquair Data Systems (traquair.com) supports up to 24-million gates of Virtex-II FPGAs by fitting four Heron-FPGA4 modules to HEPC9 carrier boards. The result is a processing-intensive, reconfigurable, DSP-powered system capable of processing very high data rates, such as encountered in digital radio (DDC), imaging and radar applications. The programmable FPGAs tout clock speeds of up to 365 MHz, as well as providing access to 83 lines of user-configurable digital I/O. And they allow high bandwidth data to be processed in real-time with software programmable functions, such as digital filters, decimators, FFTs, and down-conversion algorithms.

Addressing the Eureka 147 standard and employing a DRE200 chip from Texas Instruments, Radioscape's (radioscape.com) RS200 module promises to ease digital audio broadcast (DAB) receiver design work via a software-defined radio approach. The module operates from a 5V supply and measures just 44 mm x 110 mm x 15 mm. Teamed with a power supply, case, speakers or headset, antenna, buttons, and a display, the module is expected to reduce the design time of stereo DAB receivers with integral FM and RDS from months to weeks.

—Joe DelGatto

Outlook

Tapping The Higher Power Of New ICs
As graphics, video, audio and DSP chips grow more powerful and integrate more functions, so too will the boards that they reside on. And the markets that use these boards appear ready to integrate them into an ever broadening range of systems. Multimedia applications in theaters and the home, in particular, are expected to give strong impetus to development of new generations of advanced audio and video cards. The next twelve months should therefore usher in a host of interesting new graphics, video and audio boards.

—JDG