July 9, 1996, Montreal, Canada - Today, the Matrox Imaging Products Group announces Matrox Genesis, a PCI image processor for developing machine vision, medical imaging, and image analysis applications. OEMs and integrators used to face list prices of at least $25,000 to $30,000, and even over $90,000 for off-the-shelf VME or box-level solutions or they had to resort to the high cost of developing proprietary technology. Matrox Genesis provides even higher performance than these previous solutions and sells for 1/3 to 1/10 the cost. Now, inexpensive PC-based imaging technology has reached the required performance level to solve even the most demanding scientific and industrial applications - such as high-speed on-line quality control, web inspection, medical imaging, etc.

The Matrox Genesis design is based on a combination of leading-edge hardware components and custom ASICs. It incorporates Texas Instruments' TMS320C80 DSP and SDRAM, as well as the Matrox-designed Video Interface ASIC (VIA) and the Neighborhood Operations Accelerator (NOA) ASIC for processing. The Matrox Genesis Main Board combines real-time acquisition, processing, and display, all on a single PCI board. The advanced Grab Module can handle virtually all monochrome or color video streams. For the integrated display, it uses the Matrox MGA 2064W graphics controller and WRAM; the same technology found on the award-winning Matrox MGA Millennium graphics accelerator. Matrox Genesis provides scaleable processing: the Main Board contains one processing node; the Processor Board has one or two processing nodes. Up to 6 Processor Boards can be used with the Main Board for executing over 100 BOPS (billion operations per second) - a performance figure previously unheard of for a PC-I based imaging solution.

Developers have access to the functionality and power of the system through the Matrox Genesis Native Library which was specifically designed for solving machine vision, medical imaging and image analysis applications. Featuring high-level 'C' commands, it is the most comprehensive library for a C80-based imaging product. Matrox Genesis can also be programmed using the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL), a device-independent library which allows applications to be ported to other Matrox hardware.

The Matrox VIA is one of the outstanding features of Matrox's unique design. The VIA (Video Interface ASIC) is an intelligent controller that provides the high-performance links between the acquisition, display, and processing sections in the Matrox Genesis system, and to and from external resources. It is also a powerful data formatting engine and responsible for device synchronization. The VIA enables the C80 to be completely dedicated to processing, since the VIA off-loads all data management tasks.

Matrox Genesis has been designed to be completely configurable to match an application's specific requirements. There are several versions of the Main Board, and if one processing node is not enough (the Main Board has one node), one or more Processor Boards can be added to the system to increase performance. Matrox Genesis features completely configurable multi-processing; the developer has complete control tooptimally configure the processing across multiple nodes. There are several different ways to divide an application between nodes, for example: an image can be segmented and each node will work on a different part of the frame; since this is not suitable for some algorithms, each node can grab and process a complete frame, with each successive frame going to a different node; or, one node can be dedicated to grabbing and initial processing before passing the partial results on to the next node in the pipeline. In other words, the Matrox Genesis supports parallel or pipeline topologies, or a combination of both.

Matrox Genesis can grab and process images from virtually any color or monochrome, analog or digital video device used in industrial/medical/scientific imaging systems. Some examples are high-resolution 1K x 1K cameras, line-scan cameras, slow-scan devices, triggered monoshot cameras, single or multitap cameras (time multiplexed or parallel streams), custom designed input devices, standard monochrome (RS-170/CCIR) and RGB cameras.

Because of its flexibility and configurability, Matrox Genesis can be used to solve a broad range of applications in areas such as factory automation, semiconductor fabrication, electronic component manufacturing, PCB assembly inspection, traffic control, object tracking, surveillance, medical visualization, radiology, cell analysis, microscopy, fingerprint identification, web inspection, food and pharmaceutical inspection, robotics, x-ray security, interferometry, and military applications.

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