Cradle and Panacom collaborate on surveillance suite

Story link: Cradle and Panacom collaborate on surveillance suite by Jan Harris

Fabless semiconductor company, Cradle Technologies, and Panacom Technology Corporation, a global provider of surveillance solution equipment, have announced the production launch of a full suite of PCI cards and embedded DVRs powered by Cradle’s technology.

Panacom’s PCI DVR cards and embedded DVRs, which are based on the Cradle CT3616, a high-powered scalable MDSP, will be distributed throughout Asia and Europe.

Panacom’s surveillance products will feature Cradle’s MPEG-4 codec libraries and embedded system software. Panacom will also be a high-volume board manufacturing partner for Cradle’s newest 16-Channel Janus PCI DVR reference design. Product design and development has commenced with mass production expected to start in the third quarter of 2007.

The Janus PCI DVR can simultaneously encode up to 16 channels of video and audio using a single CT3616 MDSP, and still have room for intelligent video content analysis applications or playback.

The CT3616 MDSP is fully software programmable, allowing the Janus design to be customised for different products. Channel density, frame rate, resolution, and other parameters can be modified to accommodate video processing and analysis needs.

The Janus PCI DVR supports several video software encoders including MJPEG, MPEG-4, and H.264.

Janus also supports on-the-fly changes to encoding parameters while the video encoder is actively working. This means that frame rate, resolution, or bitrate of each individual video channel can be immediately changed when required without having to first terminate the original encoding session.

The development means that manufacturers can quickly bring to market PCI DVR cards based on a single hardware reference design, manufactured with different stuffing options. This significantly reduces development time, cost, and complexity.