The ambitious project at SRI International Inc’s David Sarnoff Research Center with Sun Microsystems Inc and Texas Instruments Inc to develop a high-resolution video workstation for displaying text, graphics and video (CI No 1,294), has now received $7.7m funding from the US Department of Defense, which sees the workstation as a building block for use in combat information systems. The Princeton, New Jersey research laboratory, which also received a $3m contract to develop its parallel video processing supercomputer – also announced last October – for the Pentagon, says that the workstation would also have applications in video teleconferencing and medical imaging. Under the agreement between the partners, Sun will build the system and provide digital image hardware and system level software, including Unix and window system, and Sarnoff will develop applications and a high-speed programmable digitiser, while Texas will examine what parts are worth putting into Silicon, and will disseminate them.
