Ixthos unveils fast PCI-SHARC bridge

Designers at Ixthos Inc. of Leesburg, Va., are introducing a new PCI mezzanine card (PMC) that bridges between a system`s PCI bus and off-board link ports of the Analog Devices SHARC digital signal processor. The PMC, called IXZPMC1, transfers data between the PCI bus and off-board SHARC DSPs at a sustained rate of 80 megabytes per second, which Ixthos officials claim is twice as fast as that of competitive devices. The new PMC has a 120-floating-point-operations-per-second SHARC DSP, and four front-panel links that are compatible with the link ports on the Ixthos standard 6U VME baseboard products. For configuration, Ixthos engineers provide host and SHARC software, which enables the user to accomplish code download and start, memory reads and writes, standard I/O, and debug. For more information, contact Mark Keck at Ixthos by phone at 703-779-7800, by fax at 703-779-7805, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.ixthos.com/. - J.K.