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A is for analog

Entry-level Matrox Odyssey XA vision processor integrates analog video capture

November 11, 2002, Montreal, Canada - The Matrox Odyssey XA is the newest member of the Matrox Odyssey family of vision processors. This new board joins the Matrox Odyssey Xpro and XCL vision processors, all of which integrate the latest off-the-shelf and custom technologies with an established, fourth-generation architecture to deliver unprecedented performance and value.

Matrox Odyssey XA

The Matrox Odyssey XA is an entry-level, non-scalable version of the Odyssey Xpro, geared towards cost-sensitive yet computationally intensive applications. Powered by the 600 MHz Motorola G4 PowerPC™ embedded microprocessor, the Matrox Odyssey XA features 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 performs up to 120 BOPS.

The Matrox Odyssey XA also takes full advantage of PCI-X bus technology, 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.

Integrated onto the Matrox Odyssey XA is an analog frame grabber that can acquire at data rates up to 800 MB per second from four 10-bit/100MHz channels that can be used independently or synchronized together.

Matrox Oasis ASIC

The high-density Matrox Oasis ASIC is the pivotal component on all boards in the Odyssey family, 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 Links Controller (LINX) is the router that manages all data movement inside and outside the processing node, which consists of the Pixel Accelerator, CPU and main memory. It can handle several concurrent video and message streams, thereby offloading data management tasks from the CPU and PA and allowing them to focus on image processing tasks.

With over 30 million transistors, the Oasis also incorporates a 128-bit wide, 166 MHz double data rate DRAM interface capable of transferring image data at rates of up to 5.3 GB per second.

All-encompassing software environment

The Odyssey software development tools for both the Odyssey XA 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.

Developers are provided with high-level algorithms and the ability to distribute workload across multiple boards. Highly optimized for the Odyssey family's onboard processors, these software libraries are carefully tuned to exhibit low function call overhead, thereby maximizing application efficiency and performance. In terms of board control, developers can either run their application remotely from the host PC, run it entirely on the board itself, or write their own custom functions for the Odyssey's onboard processors.

The Matrox Odyssey family offers support for Microsoft® Windows® 2000, Windows® XP, QNX® Neutrino® and Linux. The Matrox Odyssey XA will be available in Q2 2003.

About Matrox Imaging

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 25 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.

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