The hardware engineering projects for Tradition Ltd.
Through the years, I have been working as a hardware engineer for Tradition Ltd. I enjoyed the excellent team. All the hardware engineering projects mentioned below were inspired and sponsored by our director Anton Panfilov, and I am very grateful to him.
Telecast Design System
Telecast Design System is a set of boards and programs. It could be integrated into any video studio on TV. The main idea is: Computer must not control all things and events because it isn’t an intellectual device. But the computer must implement all the human commands and tune to a human. So, the system can be slaved from external references and controlled as a common device included in the studio. Alexander Snjatkov wrote device drivers, and Yuri Spitsin created Win95 programs.
PCI video grabber
PCI video grabber with digital video effects has separate RGB/YCrCb inputs and outputs, color correction unit, and external video reference. It can capture live video 4:2:2 up to 800×600 points per frame, store the video on SCSI disks, restores the video, and show it with digital video effects and computer graphics mixed on. Company for two NCR SCSI PCI Master controllers with four wide SCSI hard disks.
C-CUBE JPEG Processor board
C-CUBE JPEG Processor board under PCI bus for broadcast TV captures live RGB/YCrCb 4:2:2 video up to 800×600 points per frame and stores it to SCSI disk as well as restores the video and shows it with video effects, and computer graphics are mixed on.
Brooktree CODEC
Brooktree CODEC was developed for quality video AD/DA conversion. Here the input is RGB/YCrCb analog video, and the output is 1024x624x24bit digital video, and vice versa: output is 1024x624x24bit digital video, input is RGB/YCrCb analog video.
DAC / PCI controller / memory buffer
There is a frame buffer to show a video on the monitor and an interface to control Sony Betacam. It is a prototype board that was made in two weeks. There are DAC, a PCI slave controller, and a memory buffer.
Video board
Composite and S-VHS video board takes composite PAL/NTSC with Brooktree chips and stores it in memory.
TIPTITLE Video board
Another video board is TIPTITLE. The title maker puts computer graphics and text on live video. It is slaved from external video reference and has an internal video mixer. It was developed by Vladimir Yershov and programmed under DOS and Win95 by Alexander Strakhov.
Custom chips
Almost all the projects have some custom chips. Most of them are FPGA or PLD.
- Special purpose CRT controller on FPGA (CRT_WV)
- Re-programmable computing video effects machine (X-JAR)
- Video delay ASIC on FPGA (DELAY)
- Reconfigurable computer with fast I/O (RC)
- Universal frame grabber under ISA-bus
- Interfaces to different buses
Several boards were developed for Higher School of Printing and Media Technologies of Saint-Petersburg State University:
- Differential SCSI NCR53C94 ISA host controller (D96)
- Fast triple-port SCSI / PARALLEL / MULTIBUS i186 controller for embedded applications (EURO)
- PCI NCR825 SCSI processor (J825)
SCSI controller
The board differs from another by integrated BIOS and memory and differential transmitters. Differential SCSI can carry data as far as 25 meters at a single SCSI rate. The board works under the PC ISA bus.
Multibus SCSI controller
The board contains three time-concurrent channels: Multibus, SCSI (differential and single), and burst mode user DMA channel. Intel 80186 CPU appears to be correct and accurate, and it works well with NCR 53c96 SCSI controller.
Universal graphics accelerator
Universal graphics accelerator board with Cirrus Logic chips under ISA (AVGA2 and AVGA3). It was created and produced by chance, but it works perfectly.
Ethernet controller board
Intel Ethernet controller board (LAN593) and SMC Arcnet controller board (SMC) for mass production. The idea was to make popular computer boards in enormous ranges and quantities and with very small expenses.
Our team
- Konstantin Komissarov — Mathematician
- Vadim Pavlov — Designer
- Vadim Strijov – Hardware engineer
- Alexander Snyatkov — System programmer
- Yuri Spitsin — Win95 programmer
- Farid Vagapov — SCSI programmer
