News

Skymicro Announces the MerlinIP PCIe Board (28/4/2008)

Skymicro, a leading manufacturer of Video/Audio processing components for general purpose computing platforms, today announced the release of the MerlinIP – the latest incarnation of the Merlin Video/Audio Processor Board series, with the smallest form factor and most customizable processing power available. Featuring the latest customizable logic chip from Xilinx™, the Virtex-5™, the MerlinIP offers all the control and features popular with Skymicro’s Merlin board series, in a half-size, half-height PCI-e form factor.

Skymicro’s MerlinIP board is designed to perform compute-intensive video and audio processing functions in realtime, providing the opportunity to significantly reduce the amount and size of hardware necessary to perform tasks such as encoding, decoding, scaling, color space conversion, compositing, frame/field conversion and synchronization, watermarking, signal routing, audio mixing and more. The MerlinIP is designed with flexible configuration options including choice of Xilinx Virtex-5 chip, onboard memory capacity and external I/O interfaces. Battery backup for custom memory and key configurations is standard. The MerlinIP is compatible with Skymicro’s Panel lite, providing 2-in, 4-out HD/SD-SDI, AES Audio and Genlock capabilities. The MerlinIP board also works with Skymicro’s BRec video/audio encoder application, used in broadcast and post production operations worldwide.

“The MerlinIP board extends the customization capabilities of Skymicro hardware beyond software, to independent firmware developers.” said Rudy Lopez, President of Skymicro. “Our MerlinIP board design scales in power and price to address solutions across a variety of environments. We now support customization to the firmware level, providing a customizable host platform for firmware developers. We also made the core board as small as possible, while implementing a method to extend it easily and add custom hardware quickly.”

The features of the MerlinIP include choice of the Xilinx Virtex-5 110LXT, 155LXT, 220LXT or 330LXT chips or the new FXT series as well as onboard memory capacity ranging from 64MB to 2GB, using up to 4 independent DRAM chips with greater than 1 Gigabyte/second of throughput each. The infiniband™ external connector on the MerlinIP can be used for custom interfaces or with Skymicro’s Panel lite HD/SD-SDI & AES audio interface. Custom I/O interface designs are available, along with custom enclosure designs. The MerlinIP board is supported as a member of the Skymicro Merlin family in the new Skymicro AgentAPI SDK and is fully software and firmware compatible with the Skymicro MerlinHD/Director board. The MerlinIP board uses the same device drivers as the other members of the Skymicro Merlin family, ensuring complete compatibility in multi-board applications.

Skymicro Merlin boards are designed for standard and high resolution real-time video signal processing and include encoding/decoding, 4k and 2k video processing support, real-time alpha keying, dual-channel output, frame buffering and fully programmable control over frame rate, resolution and other video and audio data.

The Skymicro MerlinIP Board is currently available for OEM software developers and system integrators and will ship in May 2008. Volume shipments of the MerlinIP board will begin in June, 2008.

www.softronmedia.com  

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