SRI International’s David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, in partnership with Sun Microsystems Inc and Texas Instruments Inc has been picked by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a high-definition video workstation, to be available in two years, as part of the US high-definition television effort. The multimedia workstation will support display of mulitiple video, static image, graphics and text windows on one high-definition screen, and will combine a high resolution display with multiprocessor computation and interactive video input. Sun will build the system and provide digital image processing hardware and system-level software, including the window system and Unix operating system and Sarnoff will write application tools and utilities and develop a high-speed, programmable digitiser to convert high-definition video to digital signals to be used by the workstations. Texas will look into opportunities for advanced semiconductor components and subsystems derived from the workstation research, and ensure that the technologies developed are disseminated to US industry.
