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ADAC Data Acquisition Cards Available for Ariel's TMS320C4x ISA Bus DSP boards; First data acquisition cards to use C40 comm ports for interboard communications

Business Wire, Dec 15, 1995

Highland Park, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 15, 1995--Ariel Corp. (NASDAQ:ADSP) announced the availability of ADAC's 5400 Series ISA Bus data acquisition cards for Ariel's TMS320C4x-based ISA Bus boards.

The 5400 Series boards use four 20-Mbyte/sec TMS320C40 comm ports to communicate in a point-to-point fashion with the Ariel DSP boards, which also provide C40 comm ports. This high-bandwidth, point-to-point connection not only maximizes data acquisition throughput, but boosts overall system performance by minimizing ISA Bus traffic.

The 5400 Series features 16 analog inputs with a 1024-word FIFO and offers a choice of either 12-bit, 333-kHz or 16-bit, 100-kHz A/D conversion. The boards also feature dual-DMA capability and a gain that is programmable from 1 to 500. A clock expansion bus enables multiple 5400 cards to be synchronized. The 5400 Series cards can be controlled by the Ariel DSP boards via comm ports, or by the PC host via the ISA Bus.

The 5400 Series products work with three Ariel C4x-based ISA Bus boards. The PC-Hydra, PC-Hydra8 and Cyclops.

PC-Hydra is based on four C40 floating point digital signal processors. The four DSPs are packaged as TIM-40 modules (one DSP per module), with each module providing up to 8 Mbytes of private DRAM, or 2 Mbytes of private SRAM. The board also provides 32 kbytes of dual-ported RAM, which is shared between the host PC and the Global Bus of all four TIM-40 sites.

Other key features include twelve external 20-Mbyte/sec comm ports, an external DT-Connect interface, a dual-channel professional audio serial interface, a JTAG debug port, and a host interface that can perform block transfers at speeds of up to 2.5 Mbyte/sec.

PC-Hydra8 is a 400-MFLOPS board based on eight TMS320C44 floating point digital signal processors, which are packaged as four TIM44 modules, each containing two C44 DSPs. The board provides up to 32 Mbytes of private SRAM, twelve external 20-Mbyte/sec comm ports, and a serial interface for connection to dual-channel professional audio devices.

PC-Hydra8 also features a JTAG debug port, an ISA/EISA host interface with block transfer capability, and 32 kbytes of RAM, which is dual ported between the host PC and DSPs. Both PC-Hydra and PC-Hydra8 can be reconfigured to support any combination of up to four TIM-40 modules.

Cyclops is based on a single C40 DSP. The board provides up to 64 Mbytes of DRAM, 6 Mbytes of SRAM, and 32 kbytes of dual-ported memory (memory or I/O mapped) that is shared between Cyclops and the PC. Cyclops also provides six C40 comm ports, a DT-Connect interface, and a 32-bit Global Bus interface, which may be used to link up to four Cyclops boards, provide memory expansion, or add custom I/O.