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One of Alacron's recent additions to its FastSeries family, based on Philips' TriMedia processor, is FastVGA, a PMC daughter-card that lets you add very high speed extra I/O ports to your FastImage1303 or FastFrame1303 PCI board.

FastVGA Features

• Four muxed 24 bit (RGB) input channels
• 100MHz (140MHz) input conversion and control
• Real-time capture of high resolution VGA, LCD video, up to 1280X1024 (SXGA) at 75Hz
• 32-bit side-band to FastSeries crossbar in P4 connector
• PMC form factor
• FastChannel

• 80 MHz 32 bit persistent channels in 4 bit increments for intra - and interboard communication
• Point to Point connections at up to 320 MB/s via cross bar interconnect
• Data traffic does not affect host CPU or PCI bus
• For more information on Fast Channel click here.

Analog Video Capture Mux (4 channels)

2-1 muxed converter Two Channel to channel switching 15 ns. Bandwidth 380 MHz Channel to channel crosstalk -50 dB @ 100 MHz "OFF" isolation @ 10 MHz -100dB

Analog (24 Bit) Capture

Maximum conversion rate 140 MSPS Analog bandwidth 500 MHz Analog input range 0.5 - 1.0 V PLL clock jitter 400 ps Pixel clock output frequencies 20 - 140 MHz Formats supported Analog capture resolutions at 24 bits of 1280X1024 (SXGA) at 75 Hz

FastChannel

Alacron's FastChannel is a mechanism for the FastSeries components to communicate with the processing environment without impacting the PCI bus.

Alacron has acknowledged the need for a non-bussed form of data transfer within any high performance DSP or Imaging application. Bussed communication schemes are subject to bus saturation and contention, limiting their usefulness. The ideal interconnection scheme is to allow point to point communication from a data source to one or more data sinks. Each interconnection supports its data transfer and is isolated from any other data transfer, preventing bus saturation and contention.

FastChannel is Alacron's implementation of a point to point or point to many points connection between a data source and its sinks. FastChannel is available on Alacron's FastImage product and supports connections between the FastImage's internal resources - on the P4 connector of the PMC locations and on two ribbon cable connections for interboard communication.

In addition to its support for the one to many data transfers, FastChannel is configurable at startup. During operation the interconnections are static. Alacron has found that the need for an interconnection between a data source and sink is not dynamic in real-time and in high performance data processing applications - especially when the data rates are high. This fact allows for a significantly lower cost interconnect solution, and at the same time a simplification in software. No special hardware is required for source and destination addresses, arbitration, and control of the channel. Very simple software protocols can be implemented as the only operation allowed is the transfer of one 'word' of data.

The FastChannel is made up of three things, a parallel data path from 1 to 32 bits, a clock, and a data valid. In the current implementation, clock speeds are limited to 80 MHz and below, making the highest peak data transfer rate between a source and its sinks of 320 MB/s. The many connections in the FastChannel make it difficult to report an "overall" performance of the FastChannel - one specification that is often quoted is the cross section band-width, which is the sum of all active channels (non-blocked) data rates in the best cast. The cross-section bandwidth is 2.4 GB per second per FastImage board. Interboard communication is limited to 320 MB/s