The high-density Matrox Oasis ASIC is the pivotal component on the Odyssey Xpro and integrates a CPU bridge, main memory controller, Pixel Accelerator and Links Controller. The Pixel Accelerator (PA) is a 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 167 MHz enables the PA to process up to two billion pixels per second.

The Odyssey Xpro is the first vision processor 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 custom-designed Matrox System Interface Bridge (SIB) ASIC, a four-port PCI-X router, handles the PCI-X connections on the Odyssey Xpro, including those between processing nodes, to optional frame grabber modules and to the host PC, including display. The Odyssey Xpro offers superb scalability by way of a pair of link ports dedicated to interconnecting multiple boards. These ports provide point-to-point PCI-X connections, delivering up to 1 GB per second of bandwidth.

The Odyssey Xpro can capture from the majority of area or line scan video sources, thanks to a standard PCI mezzanine card (PMC) site located on the board that allows for the addition of Camera Link™ and analog frame grabber modules. The Camera Link module, which acquires up to 680 MB per second, is available in two versions. The dual-base version enables simultaneous acquisition from two completely independent Camera Link video sources using the Base configuration, while the single-full configuration acquires from a single Camera Link video source using the Base, Medium or Full configuration. The analog module, which acquires up to 800 MB per second, provides four 10-bit/100MHz channels that can be used independently or synchronized together.

The Odyssey XCL is an entry-level, non-scalable version of the Odyssey Xpro, geared towards cost-sensitive yet computationally intensive applications. Also featuring the Motorola G4 PowerPC™ embedded microprocessor, running at 600 MHz, the Odyssey XCL offers 256 MB of DDR SDRAM memory, up to 1 GB per second of external I/O bandwidth, over 5 GB per second of memory bandwidth and delivers up to 120 BOPS. The Odyssey XCL also takes full advantage of PCI-X bus technology and integrates a Camera Link frame grabber that acquires up to 680 MB per second and offers the same configuration options as the Odyssey Xpro Camera Link module.

The Odyssey software development tools for both the Odyssey Xpro and Odyssey XCL offer developers a choice of application programming interfaces (APIs) and programming models. The board can be programmed using either the award-winning, hardware-independent Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) or the Matrox Odyssey Native Library (ONL), which is compatible with the Matrox Genesis family of vision processors. Both options come with royalty-free run-time environments.

Matrox Imaging is the only leading designer and manufacturer of PC-based hardware and software for machine vision, image analysis and medical imaging to draw on over 26 years of industry experience to meet customer needs. Headquartered in Dorval, Quebec, Canada, Matrox is a privately held company with international offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Hong Kong. For more company information, visit About Us.