August 28, 2012 -- MSC Embedded, Inc. today announced its compact Qseven MSC Q7-TI8168 module in a new, higher-performance variant with a DaVinci DM8168 digital media processor by Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI). The processor integrates an ARM Cortex-A8 RISC MPU (up to 1.5GHz), the C674x floating-point VLIW digital signal processor (DSP) with up to 8000MIPS and 6000MFLOPS, as well as video and graphics accelerators.

The DM8168 digital media processor processes up to three 1080p 60-fps video streams simultaneously and is perfectly suited for multi-channel HD video-monitoring systems, video-conference systems and media hubs and servers. The DSP also manages the compute-intensive image processing in real-time, thus reducing the load on the ARM processor. TI offers comprehensive software support for numerous imaging tasks, including digital filtering, complex mathematical calculations, image processing and image analysis.

The high-performance Qseven MSC Q7-TI8168 module is specifically suited to handle demanding visualization and multimedia tasks, e.g., in industrial automation, medicine and biometrics, as well as in high-end measurement technology or even the fields of tracking and safety engineering.

As standard interfaces, the embedded platform features an HDMI/ DVI interface with resolution up to 1920x1080 pixels and a single-channel LVDS 24-bit with up to 1280x720 pixels. In addition to a PCI Express x1 port, the platform also has a Gbit Ethernet interface, six USB 2.0 connections, SPI, HD AC97 audio and a camera interface. User data can be saved using either of two SATA II channels. A memory card can be connected using the SD/SDIO interface. The Qseven module integrates a fast, 1-GByte DDR3-1600 SRAM, up to 8GBytes of NAND Flash and an on-board soldered Flash SSD with 2-GByte capacity.

Because the Qseven module complies with specification 1.20, it can be easily attached to a standard Qseven baseboard or a user-developed baseboard. Numerous development platforms are available, enabling quick evaluation and simple design-in.

Availability and Pricing

The Qseven MSC Q7-TI8168 module is available immediately, and is priced at $190 is OEM quantities. A special ARM-based Qseven MSC Q7-TI8168 module will also be available in the fourth quarter of 2012 that can handle an expanded range of temperatures, from -40°C to +85°C.

Posted by: John Miklosz