November 11, 2002, Montreal, Canada - Today Matrox Imaging announced the Matrox Helios family, the new standard in high-performance frame grabbers. The Matrox Helios fully exploits PCI-X technology to deliver unprecedented video capture rates for a single-board solution. With both CameraLink™ and analog versions available, the Matrox Helios frame grabbers can easily accommodate the most demanding video capture applications. A custom ASIC, designed by Matrox and found on all Matrox Helios frame grabbers, combines a PCI-X controller with a powerful processor core to alleviate the host CPU from image formatting and pre-processing tasks. These features provide the Matrox Helios frame grabbers with the power and flexibility needed for vision applications today and tomorrow.

Matrox Helios is one of the first frame grabbers on the market to take full advantage of the new PCI-X bus technology. PCI-X is a high-performance, backwards-compatible enhancement to the conventional PCI bus specification. Version 1.0 of PCI-X specifies a 64-bit physical connection running at speeds of up to 133 MHz, resulting in a peak bandwidth of up to 1 GB per second.

The Pixel Accelerator (PA) is a programmable parallel processor core that accelerates neighborhood, point-to-point and LUT mapping operations. It consists of an array of 64 processing elements all working in parallel. Operating at a core frequency of 133 MHz enables the PA to process up to 1.6 billion pixels per second.

The Oasis also incorporates a 128-bit wide, double data rate DRAM interface running at 133 MHz, that delivers up to 4.3 GB per second of on-board memory I/O. The formatting logic inside the Oasis chip enables real-time image reconstruction from multi-tap cameras without requiring any intervention from the host CPU.

Matrox Helios XA is the analog variant that supports video capture rates of up to 800 MB/sec, and features four 10-bit/ 100 MHz channels that can be used independently or synchronized together.

The Matrox Helios frame grabbers are supported under Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP. Helios XCL will be available in Q1 2003, and the Helios XA will be available in Q3 2003.

For more information, contact our Media Relations Team.