JANUARY 29--Primagraphics (Amherst, MA; www.primagraphics.net) has launched its Hawkeye product family--a new range of commercial-off-the-shelf sensor input and display cards in PCI mezzanine card format. The Hawkeye range, compatible with both VME and Compact PCI host cards, provides customers with flexibility over choice of host processor--Power PC, Sun Sparc, or Intel Pentium--and operating environment--Linux, Solaris or Windows. "Each of the Hawkeye cards packs in a highly integrated set of capabilities that will enable system developers to reduce their card count and therefore the overall cost," said John Shave, Primagraphics managing director.
The family, which at launch includes four different cards, has been designed with flexibility in mind. Central to this is the use of the Digital Video Interface (DVI) standard as a method of linking boards together. This technique provides the ability to combine several display windows onto a final output display, by digitally mixing, at each board in the chain, the incoming graphics signal with the additional display window generated by the card.
Falcon is an integrated video and graphics capture board that supports a full range of display resolutions up to 1280 x 1024 pixels. The card provides the host-processor-generated graphics, and video window if required, and is equipped with both a DVI and standard RGB output capability to drive a monitor directly.
Osprey is an acquisition and digitization card, which includes a powerful processor to allow the software implementation of custom radar processing algorithms, and a high-level command interface. The card will handle a wide range of radar types including standard ACP/ARP, 12 bit parallel azimuth for Synchro, as well as ASDE-3 and RADDS serial azimuth formats.
Eagle is a radar scan converter. The reverse scan conversion algorithm implemented on the Eagle card ensures that there are no holes or spokes in the displayed image when mapping the polar data to Cartesian coordinates.
Talon is a carrier and network interface card for the Hawkeye range. Available in either VME or Compact PCI format, it incorporates a powerful processor and embedded operating system. When used with the Hawkeye PMC cards, it allows highly cost-effective, low-slot-count systems to be built.
The Hawkeye cards are supported by a full range of software, allowing developers to design systems for applications as diverse as radar video servers, multifunction, 'thin-client' display consoles, video windowing systems, and radar trackers.
