Alacron Introduces FastVision

NASHUA, NH -September 6, 2001 - Alacron Inc., a leader in the design, development, and manufacture of high performance framegrabbers and computing subsystems for the imaging, vision, and DSP marketplace, has released its FastVision processing board. FastVision, the latest addition to Alacron's product line, is a full-length PCI board with up to two Motorola AltiVec processors, each with 8-16 MB of dedicated high speed (572 MB/sec) SDRAM and the capability of providing over 2.6-3.6 GFLOPS of computational power. Along with traditional analog and digital input methodologies, the FastVision has included the Channel Link (Camera Link) and IEEE1394 (Firewire) Interfaces.

Powerful Motorola AltiVec Processor
The AltiVec processor adds a new vector-processing engine with 162 new instructions to the PowerPC architecture making the AltiVec ideal for computationally intense applications requiring high bandwidth. The vector architecture allows the simultaneous processing of many data items in parallel and up to 16 operations in a single clock cycle. The 64 bit wide bus provides greater bandwidth for demanding real-time imaging and vision applications.

On-Board Data Capture
Up to two Motorola AltiVec G4 Processors (450MHz) provide full computational power at 7.2 GOPS (8bit) applied to video stream. Two PMC connectors on the back of the FastVision board allow one to increase and expand the computational processing power and I/O capabilities. They provide support for two 32 or 64 bit (33MHz) PMC modules and support a 200MB/s Fast Channel interface. These PMC connectors are PCI Rev. 2.1 compliant, guaranteeing third-party PMC compatibility. The two bi-directional Channel Link ports are for packet switched inter-card transfers at 1.4 Gbits/sec per port.

PMC Expansion Slots and Output Capabilities
The on-board host PCI resources can be directly addressed by each AltiVec processor via a PCI bridge. There are two standard PMC expansion slots, with back panel access to module I/O.

About Alacron, Inc.
ALACRON is the leader in the design, development and manufacture of high performance framegrabbers and coprocessor subsystems for demanding real-world Imaging and DSP applications. Alacron offers a comprehensive line of compute solutions for PCI, PMC, and VME bus platforms which include extensive libraries of microcoded image and signal processing algorithms.  ALACRON'S customers include a wide range of OEMs, government agencies, research institutions and universities.