Hardware Requirements

Products developed by VAS GmbH are almost exclusively used in the industrial sector. This sector demands a wide temperature range, a high robustness and strong security constraints for the system specification to be met.

Especially in the railway sector increased constraints have to be fulfilled by the system in the field of safety and radiation. These devices have to be certified according to the E1 norm.

On the hardware side, we achieve this with keeping EMC requirements in mind during the design and layout phases and take appropriate steps in respect to cope with voltage spikes.

In the area of ​​firmware, image processing software and managing system programs, we have hardware and software components coupled, so that they control each other and thus achieve the highest possible integrity of the systems we develop (hardware and software watchdog).

FPGA

FPGA designs will go through extensive simulations and possible disturbances in the specified temperature range are triggered while developing to ensure trouble-free operation in field.

We create FPGA designs since 1995 for almost all video processing products. Starting with FPGAs in antifuse technology (QuickLogic) programmed in Verilog, to the currently used FPGAs in FLASH technology (Actel/Microsemi) programmed in VHDL, we are able to implement extremely fast, as well as complex tasks, in these chips.

DSP/Processor Systems

Since 1999, we are successfully deploying the usage of DSPs in video processing. For programming we use the appropriate development tools provided by the manufacturer, embedded in our build and versioning environment.

For many years, we have good experience with:

Host Processor

In the area of system ​​control we use in stand-alone devices a PowerPC or ever-increasingly ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC), formerly also modules like ETX, programmed under the Linux operating system.

Video Digitization

VAS has many years of experience within the use of high-quality A/D and D/A converters in the field of composite video signals, usually in combination with complex time-division multiplexing systems. But the trend towards video over IP is also not neglected here.

PCI plug-in cards

For server-based video systems, VAS GmbH has designed, developed and produced various multi-channel video compression cards, as well as TV cards.