Radstone Technology Plc, the Towcester, Northampshire-based management buy-out of Plessey Microsystems which specialises in VME boards and systems, has decided to launch itself into the image processing and graphics market, announcing last week a new graphics division and a new computer sub-system which combines imaging and vector graphics in one unit. The new graphics division, Radstone Vision Technology will market the new product, VisionMaster, and its successors, on a worldwide basis. The graphics sub-system has a real-time image processing performance of 160 MIPS and its real-time frame grabber operates at up to 30m samples per second. It drives colour displays of up to 2,048 by 1,024 pixels with eight, 24 or 32-bit pixel depth. Video memory is expandable to 256Mb, enabling 30 seconds of real-time television to be stored in the unit and manipulated. And the programmable video input-output interface supports television broadcast standards; standard computer display formats are also supported. Radstone will also be offering a suite of software development tools, application libraries and operating systems to enable VisionMaster to run on standard workstations under, for example, SunOS with PixRect support or Unix with X Window support – OS-9, VxWorks and MS-DOS support is promised for the future. Applications envisaged for the system, says the company, include real-time simulation, geographic information systems, computer-aided design visualisation, defence-related displays – radar, sonar and command, control and communications, medical imaging, printing pre-press, broadcast animation and industrial inspection. As a one-off, VisionMaster, which the company sees as a low-end system that will open up the market, will ship for UKP12,500 for an 8-bit configuration, but Radstone says it has the capacity for volume production, which is where it is aiming.
