The hardware projects for Tradition Ltd.

Trough the years I have been working for Tradition ltd., I enjoyed the excellent team. All these projects were inspired and sponsored by our president Anton Panfilov and I am very grateful to him.

Telecast Design System is a set of boards and programs. It could be integrated into any video studio on TV. The main idea is: Computer must not control all the things and events, because it isn't an intellectual device. But computer has to implement all the human commands and has to tune to a human. So, the system can be slaved from external references and can be controlled as common device included into studio.
Device drivers are written by Alexander Snjatkov, Win95 programs are created by Yuri Spitsin.

PCI video grabber with digital video effects has separate RGB/YCrCb inputs and outputs, color correction unit and external video reference. It can capture live video 4:2:2 up to 800x600 points per frame and store the video on SCSI disks as well as restores the video and show it with digital video effects and computer graphics mixed on. Company for two NCR SCSI PCI Master controllers with four wide SCSI hard disks.

C-CUBE JPEG Processor board under PCI bus for broadcast TV captures live RGB/YCrCb 4:2:2 video up to 800x600 points per frame and stores it to SCSI disk as well as restores the video and shows it with video effects and computer graphics are mixed on.

Brooktree CODEC is needed for quality video AD/DA conversion. Here input is RGB/YCrCb analog video and output is 1024x624x24bit digital video and vice versa: output is 1024x624x24bit digital video, input is RGB/YCrCb analog video.

There is a frame buffer to show a video on monitor and interface to control Sony Betacam. It is a prototype board was made in two weeks. There are DAC, PCI slave controller and memory buffer.

Composite and S-VHS video board takes composite PAL/NTSC with Brooktree chips and stores it in memory.

Another video board is TIPTITLE. The title maker puts computer graphics and text on live video. It is slaved from external video reference and has internal video mixer. Was developed by Vladimir Yershov and programmed under DOS and Win95 by Alexander Strakhov.

Almost all the projects have a number of custom chips. Most of them are FPGA or PLD.

  • Special purpose CRT controller on FPGA (CRT_WV)
  • Re-programmable computing video effects machine (X-JAR)
  • Video delay ASIC on FPGA (DELAY)
  • Reconfigurable computer with fast I/O (RC)
  • Universal frame grabber under ISA-bus
  • Interfaces to different buses

The boards were developed for St. Petersburg Institute of Poligraphs:

  • Differential SCSI NCR53C94 ISA host controller (D96)
  • Fast triple-port SCSI / PARALLEL / MULTIBUS i186 controller for embedded applications (EURO)
  • PCI NCR825 SCSI processor (J825)

The board differs from another by integrated BIOS and memory and differential transmitters. Differential SCSI can carry a data as far as 25 meters at single SCSI rate. The board works under PC ISA bus.

The board contain three time-concurrent channels: Multibus, SCSI(both differential and single) and burst mode user DMA channel. Intel 80186 CPU appears to be correct and accurate and it works very together with NCR 53c96 SCSI controller very well.

Vector accelerator board for process simulation in fast response systems (8514A). The project was ordered by military department for simulation purposes. Since the board was sold to the army, we have no photo.

Universal graphics accelerator board with Cirrus Logic chips under ISA (AVGA2 and AVGA3). It was created and produced by chance, but works perfectly.

Intel Ethernet controller board (LAN593) and SMC Arcnet controller board (SMC) for mass production There was an idea to make popular computer boards at enormous range and quantities and very small expense.

Our team