Engineers at Analogic Corp. in Peabody, Mass., needed digital signal processing technology for their EXACT computed tomography (CT) machine, which is the guts of the L-3 Communications` eXaminer 3DX 6000 explosive detection system.
They found their answer with the Excalibur daughtercards from Sky Computers in Chelmsford, Mass.
The eXaminer 3DX 6000 is the first FAA-certified system to generate full, three-dimensional (3D) images of all objects in bags, says Peter Harris, president of international security systems at Analogic.
The system then automatically isolates and quickly analyzes every item against the characteristics of explosive materials. If a match is found, the system alerts the operator, highlights the area of concern for further analysis with a full rotating 3-D image of the potential threat, and then isolates the bag for appropriate action.
Sky`s technology is easy to work with and very efficient, Harris says.
The Excalibur devices help the system process 500 bags per hour, more than twice the capacity of existing systems, Analogic officials claim. The eXaminer 3DX 6000 is also approximately half the size and weight of first-generation explosive detection systems.
Based on the PowerPC 604e, the Excalibur compute daughtercard delivers as much as 2.66 billion floating point operations per second of processing performance for demanding applications.
Excalibur supports high-speed processing with high-speed memory and high-speed communication. The memory pipelining and streaming features of the PowerPC 604e microprocessor are augmented with prefetch hardware to enable each processor on Excalibur to sustain 100 percent of the memory bandwidth for vector operations. — J.M.
For more information on Excalibur or Sky Computers, contact Diane Capps by phone at 978-250-1920, by fax at 978-250-0036, by mail at Sky Computers, 27 Industrial Ave., Chelmsford, Mass. 01824, or on the World Wide Web at http://www. sky.com.
The Excalibur processor from Sky Computers helps Analogic power an L-3 Communications explosives-detection system.
