Out in Front: February 1, 1996

Alta Group’s Envision multimedia-design system helps you cope with the complexity of designing digital-video, color-copier, document-imaging and similar systems. Alta based the system on the company’s recently announced Convergence Architecture, which addresses the convergence of system- and chip-level design, along with multimedia and communications applications. Envision help you define, verify, and analyze multimedia-system functionality at the behavioral level. This high-level design capability lets you optimize a system’s architecture and parameters before you translate it into a register-transfer-level (RTL) implementation.

Envision comprises analysis tools and a predefined library of image-processing modules, including functional blocks for operations such as signal creation, 2-D filtering, display, type conversion, block manipulation, and DSP transforms. You use these modules to graphically construct your system. The Envision analysis tools let you see the results as video images at different points of the design, allowing you to run simulations and vary the system to meet design specifications. The system uses an object-oriented simulation environment to handle complex multimedia data, such as images and video clips. This feature is important, because DSP operations in multimedia systems can depend on the organization and value of data. For example, 2-D image filtering operates on each pixel’s brightness and location, as well as the format of the image. Envision’s object-oriented technology lets the system efficiently handle data organizational changes as they pass through the system being designed.

Another useful feature is a memory manager that works with multimedia data objects. The memory manager tracks the lifetime of each data object in the system diagram and recognizes any memory-pattern demands. By performing this task, Envision reduces workstation memory and swapping requirements, boosting simulation efficiency. Envision runs on Hewlett-Packard and Sun workstations. It will be available during the first quarter for $60,000. Owners of Alta’s SPW software can upgrade to Envision for $20,000
-- by Jim Lipman

Alta Group, Sunnyvale, CA. (408) 733-1595