Number Of Cameras Per Board; Pci Bandwidth Requirements - Matrox Corona Installation And Hardware Reference

46 Chapter 5: Using multiple Matrox Corona boards

Number of cameras per board

The number of cameras that can be attached per board depends
on the camera type.
The video decoder path can switch between four independent
composite/monochrome cameras or two Y/C cameras.
The RGB digitization section can accept input from one RGB
camera or can switch between three independent monochrome
cameras. The synchronization signal can be on any component
of the RGB input or can be received on the external sync
channel (VID_IN4).
Also, the RGB digitization section can accept simultaneous
input from three genlocked monochrome cameras. The inputs
are stored in separate color bands of the same buffer; the buffer
can be in planar format. A single two-channel monochrome
camera (dual tap) can also be connected.
The MIL-Lite MdigChannel() command can be used to switch
between channels.

PCI bandwidth requirements

Sustained PCI-transfers to memory require the use of a high
performance PCI core-logic chipset, such as the Intel 430HX,
430VX, 430TX, 440FX, 440LX, or 440BX. If a high performance
chipset is used, you should not have any PCI bandwidth
problems when transferring a full-sized image from a Matrox
Corona in real-time. However, when using multiple Matrox
Coronas and transferring more than one image simultaneously
you might encounter PCI bandwidth problems. In this case, you
might have to reduce the image size to avoid reaching the upper
limits of the overall available bandwidth.