With the rapid growth of CCTV, surveillance systems, and other video-based security products, Texas Instruments has teamed up with French company Ateme to provide a bundled development-tool platform for the sector. It supports the creation of functions such as compression at high ratios for image storage, extraction of features from video streams for movement detection and tracking, number-plate recognition, and biometric identity verification. System integrators are demanding these features in a sector that analogue technology still dominates (setting low price expectations) and in which complex software is still relatively uncommon. With a prepackaged hardware solution and libraries of software routines, TI and Ateme expect to ease the progress of digital techniques in video-surveillance systems.

TI bases the platform around its 642-series processor. The company has also released the first family member, the C6412, which runs at 600 MHz at less than 1W. The part is available in a 500- or 600-MHz (1000- or 1200-MMAC) version, or an even faster 720-MHz version. It comes with on-chip Ethernet MAC, PCI port and other peripherals, and 288 kbytes of RAM. The device costs roughly $40 to $50, depending on its speed. TI is positioning the part as a high-performance-at-low-systems-cost member of the C64xx lineup.

Texas Instruments, www.ti.com/c6412launch.