Inmos International Plc has added a new member to its signal processing family with the IMS A110, which the Thorn EMI company rates at over 400m operations per second on video data when clocked 1t 20MHz. The A110 uses a parallel processing pipeline of 21 multiplier accumulators, which can be configured as a single linear array or as a three-by-seven two dimensional window – and any number of A110s can be cascaded. The original A100 has 32 multiplier-accumulators, but they are in a fixed linear array. The new A110 has an 8-bit wide signal path, three 1,120-stage shift registers of programmable length, each able to hold a line of video data – just the thing when you’re trying to make a low definition TV signal look good – and a back-end processor to do data transformation and normalisation. Aimed specifically at video applications, the part is expected to be snapped up by builders of robot vision systems, medical imaging, high definition and low-bandwidth television, night vision systems, document scanners and satellite image processing. The CMOS part integrates 400,000 transistors, and samples will be available at the end of the year. Only indication of price is down to UKP70 in volume in two years’ time.
