Processing Capabilities - Matrox Helios Series Installation And Hardware Reference

Matrox Oasis
PA
Links Controller

Processing capabilities

To alleviate the image formatting and preprocessing tasks performed by the CPU
of the host computer (Host), all Matrox Helios boards include the custom Matrox
Oasis ASIC. Using this ASIC, Matrox Helios can preprocess and format grabbed
data before transferring it to the Host.
❖ Although the Host can also transfer images to Matrox Helios, and use Matrox
Oasis to perform some time consuming supported processing operations, this is
typically not recommended. You can lose efficiency and performance by
transferring the data back and forth between the Host and Matrox Helios.
Matrox Oasis is a high-density chip that integrates the pixel accelerator (PA), a
links controller with data formatters, and main memory controller.
The PA is a parallel processing core, which considerably accelerates neighborhood,
point-to-point, and LUT mapping operations. The PA can perform up to
80 billion operations per second. In addition, I/O-bound functions, such as image
arithmetic functions, benefit from the 5.3 Gbytes/sec memory bandwidth of
Matrox Oasis.
The PA consists of an array of 64 processing elements, all working in parallel. Each
processing element has a multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit and an
arithmetic-logic unit (ALU). The MAC unit is capable of performing a single
16-bit by 16-bit, two 8-bit by 16-bit, or four 8-bit by 8-bit multiplies with 40-bit
accumulation per cycle for convolution operations. The ALU can execute a wide
variety of arithmetic and logical operations, and can be programmed to execute a
sequence of 256 instructions per pixel at one instruction per cycle.
The links controller (LINX) is the router that manages all data movement within
Matrox Helios. It oversees the transfer of image data from the frame grabber
section to on-board memory for preprocessing and from on-board memory to
Host or display memory. Image data can be subject to various formatting
operations, including: plane separation on input and merging on output, input
cropping, input and output subsampling (1 to 16), and independent control of
the horizontal and vertical scanning direction. The latter is particularly useful for
reconstructing a proper image from a video source whose readout requires multiple
taps, each with different scanning directions.
Matrox Helios boards 15