Curtiss-Wright / Prima Graphics CAT Video Processor with Panther Dual Display Card

The Curtiss-Wright / Prima Graphics CAT provides a single board solution to a wide range of demanding radar, sonar and video processing and display applications in a 6U VME form factor. The CAT combines extremely flexible multilayered graphics with an expandable design that allows a number of input/output daughterboards to be used. The CAT can perform realtime data processing functions such as radar tracking, live TV windows and radar video compression or decompression. Radar scan conversion can be performed in software by the CAT or externally by one of Primagraphics’ family of Vantage cards.The TMS320C80 (C80) Multimedia Video Processor (MVP) provides up to 2 billion operations per second (BOPS) of processing power, together with optimized block data copy modes. During each second of processing, the C80 can move 2.4GB of data and 1.8GB of instructions within the chip. The C80 is a powerful RISC processor supported by four on-chip advanced DSP processors. The DSPs are particularly suited to graphics and radar processing applications where fully parallel processing can be employed.

The CAT board can act as a VME64 master or slave and supports the 64-bit VME block transfer mode. A 512KB block of shared SRAM between the VME interface and the processor decouples processor activity from bus activity. The board includes 32MB of SDRAM.

The CAT can operate either under the control of a VME host or in a stand-alone configuration. In support of standalone operation, 1MB of flash EPROM memory is included, as well as four serial channels for keyboard and mouse control and general I/O.

The CAT can accommodate up to two application daughterboards, to perform acquisition and processing of a number of types of data such as TV video, radar, sonar and linescan video. A range of display daughterboards allows multi-layered interlaced or non-interlaced displays to be generated at resolutions from VGA to 2048×2048.

Software support for the CAT includes specially optimized releases of PARIS, Primalib Graphics Library and X11R6 Server.