Modules Attack Signal Processing, Video

Jan. 20, 2005

PCI mezzanine card (PMC) modules offer expansion capabilities for single-board computers with PMC slots. Two new entries in this arena have expanded the designer's playing field. Bittware's T2-PMC contains a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA; a 64-bit, 66-

William G. Wong

PCI mezzanine card (PMC) modules offer expansion capabilities for single-board computers with PMC slots. Two new entries in this arena have expanded the designer's playing field.

Bittware's T2-PMC contains a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA; a 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI interface; up to 256 Mbytes of SDRAM; and four 600-MHz ADSP-TS201 TigerSharc DSPs. The board delivers over 4 Gbytes/s of throughput using the ATLANTiS (Advanced Transfer Link Architecture for New TigerSharc) interface. Performance for the board is estimated to be 14.4 GFLOPS for floating-point operations and 57.5 BOPS for 16-bit fixed-point operations. Software support is available for Analog Devices' VisualDSP++ and SDL's DSPdeveloper target for Matlab and Simulink. The T2-PMC starts at $8595.

The P517 video PMC from MEN Micro utilizes Silicon Motion's SM731 graphics controller with a 235-MHz RAMDAC and 16 Mbytes of SGRAM to deliver high-performance 2D/3D video output. The digital video interface (DVI-I) handles analog and digital LCD and CRT screens. Front-panel connections include DVI-I, S-video inputs and outputs, and a composite video output. The P517's two low-voltage differential-signaling channels are accessible via an on-board connector or a rear-panel connector on the P517's carrier board. The board supports dual monitors. Drivers are available for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and OS-9. Pricing for the P517 starts at $594.

BittWare Inc.www.bittware.comMEN Micro Inc.www.menmicro.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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