Aitech Defense Systems Inc. recently announced the M598, the latest video and graphics PMC in its vast line of AMD-driven solutions, designed to simultaneously drive several independent video streams in a wide variety of outputs. The versatile PMC uses the AMD Radeon E8860 (Andelaar) GPU, providing six independent graphics heads with 2 GB of GDDR5 operating at up to 1125 MHz.

In addition to the independent video stream capture, the M598 provides advanced video overlay functionality. Once the E8860 processor generates the graphics images, an input from one of the video formats is superimposed and the final image is sent to a monitor. Used in civil or military aviation or ground vehicle systems, the M598 is ideal for a number of graphics-intensive display computing environments. These include fixed- and rotary-wing mission and cockpit display computers and heads-up displays as well as electro-optical (EO) video camera, EO night vision and Infrared (IR) video frame grabbing, multi-role tactical mission displays found in advanced 2D and 3D C4ISR and EW video processing systems.A 4th generation unified video decoder (UVD) within the GPU decodes H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and MPEG4 formats. Up to 128 MB of DDR3 for real time image conversion and data manipulation also supports full 2D/3D video processing capabilities in the M598. The resultant videos and images can be routed to the PMC's various analog and digital output channels available standard on the AMD GPU or to the optional sophisticated FPGA for output.

Standard I/O includes DVI, HDMI, RGBHV and composite/S-Video outputs as well as STANAG 3350 and composite/S-Video inputs. High-speed data transfer is assured thanks to the 64-bit PCI-X link with the host system.

The board offers enhanced graphic and video support, including DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.2, OpenCL 1.2 and Shader 5.0 as well as video resize, formatting and conditioning options facilitate easy customization. Multiple video signal formats are supported for TV, VESA, SMPTE/HDTV and STANAG 3350 video standards. Windows, Linux, VxWorks and INTEGRITY operating systems are supported.

An on-board temperature sensor and configurable thermal shutdown options on the M598 provide added security for working in harsh environments with extreme temperature ranges from -40°C to +85°C.

Military-grade versions of the M598 can withstand altitudes of over 70,000 ft. as well as shock and vibration per VITA 47 specifications. The board comes in standard air-cooled and conduction-cooled versions. Typical power consumption at idle is 15.7 W and max 33.8 W when running at 625 MHz.

Technical Specifications:

• AMD Radeon E8860 Andelaar processor
• Multiple independent video stream capture and overlay functionality
• Optional FPGA for additional supported video protocols and formats
• High performance video and graphics processing and high-speed transfers