ginngi engineering

A PCI based co-processor board with a high performance RISC processor was implemented to provide superior computing power for IBM PCs. At a time when PC platforms had limited CPU performance and when RISC processors were readily available it was popular to use add-on boards to perform co-processing functions. This board was designed using an Intel high-speed i960 RISC processor and a V3 PCI Bridge. It had its own local SDRAM with a controller to interface to the PCI Bridge.

Our customer was developing a system that took advantage of a sideband in terrestrial transmission (NICAM), normally used for high-quality audio channels, for the transmission of data. Since no standard hardware existed they turned to us to develop a PC board to provide such an interface. The board consisted of a RF terrestrial tuner, a NICAM decoder chip, and interface logic for the ISA bus. Data as decoded by the NICAM chip was made available over the ISA bus using a hardware FIFO.

The board consisted of an Intel i486 CPU running Microsoft DOS with a large number of proprietary interfaces to control an industrial scanner.