BitFlow Cyton-CXP, Hardware Reference Manual

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General Description and Architecture The Cyton-CXP family
Version A.0 BitFlow, Inc. CYT-1-1
General Description and Architecture
Chapter 1
1.1 The Cyton-CXP family
The purpose of this chapter is to explain, at a block diagram level, how the Cyton-CXP
works. Currently there is two main models in the Cytron-CXP family:
CYT-PC2-CXP4, provides four 6.25 Gb/S CXP links
CYT-PC2-CXP2, provides two 6.25 Gb/S CXP links
To see how Cyton compares to the Karbon CXP models, see Section 1.5
1.1.1 CoaXPress
In order to understand how the Cyton-CXP works, it is helpful to understand the
basics of CoaXPress. It is beyond the scope of this manual to describe how CoaX-
PRess works, however, more information on the CoaXPress specification is available
from www.coaxpress.com.
1.1.2 Virtual vs. Hardware
It’s important to understand how this manual works. Some chapters of this manual dis-
cuss the Cyton-CXP as a hardware platform (this chapter is a good example). While
other chapters discuss the details of the virtual frame grabbers (VFG) that this hard-
ware platform supports. The concept of the virtual frame grabber is described below,
but basically the idea is that one hardware platform can support more than one
device. In the case of the Cyton-CXP, these devices are frame grabbers.
Note that we are not using the word virtual here in the sense of “a software virtualiza-
tion of a hardware device”, these VFGs are real hardware. The reason we using “vir-
tual” is because the term “frame grabber” has more than one meaning. It can mean
the piece of hardware that you put in your computer, or it can mean the device that
the your software application is controlling and getting images from. For the pur-
poses of this manual, “virtual frame grabber” means the device that your application
is interfaces with. While this might sound complicated, the implementation is simple.
You plug our Cyton-CXP frame grabber into your PC, and your application interacts
with one or more VFGs available. Everything else is taken care of by the BitFlow driv-
ers.