Chapter 2
Hardware Overview
©
National Instruments Corporation
2-3
The color-space processor can export the video data in 32-bit RGB or HSL
formats or in individual 8-bit hue, saturation, or luminance planes. For
more information on these image types, see the
section in Appendix A,
SDRAM
The NI 1411 comes with 16 MB of onboard high-speed synchronous
dynamic RAM (SDRAM). The NI 1411 can use the onboard RAM as a
first-in first-out (FIFO) buffer, transferring the image data as it is acquired
or acquiring the image data into SDRAM and holding it for later transfer to
main memory.
Trigger Control and Mapping Circuitry
The trigger control monitors and drives the external trigger line. You can
configure this line to start an acquisition on a rising or falling edge and
drive the line asserted or unasserted, similar to a digital I/O line. You can
also map many of the NI 1411 status signals to this trigger line and program
the trigger line in polarity and direction.
Acquisition, Scaling, ROI
The acquisition, scaling, and region-of-interest (ROI) circuitry monitors
the incoming video signals and routes the active pixels to the SDRAM
memory. The NI 1411 can perform ROI and scaling on all video lines and
frames. Pixel and line scaling transfers certain multiples (two, four, or
eight) of pixels and lines to onboard memory. In an ROI acquisition, you
select an area within the acquisition window to transfer to the PCI bus.
Scatter-Gather DMA Controllers
The NI 1411 uses three independent onboard direct memory access (DMA)
controllers. The DMA controllers transfer data between the onboard
SDRAM memory buffers and the PCI bus. Each of these controllers
supports scatter-gather DMA, which allows the DMA controller to
reconfigure on-the-fly. Thus, the NI 1411 can perform continuous image
transfers directly to either contiguous or fragmented memory buffers.
Bus Master PCI Interface
The NI 1411 implements the PCI interface with a National Instruments
custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), the PCI MITE. The
PCI interface can transfer data at a maximum rate of 132 Mbytes/s in
bus master mode. The NI 1411 can generate 8-, 16-, and 32-bit memory
