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Datacube Inc. (1978–2005) was an image processing company that developed real-time hardware and software products for the industrial, medical, military and scientific markets. ==Early history== Datacube was founded in the mid-70's by Stanley Karandanis and J Stewart Dunn. In the early days, Datacube manufactured board level products for the Multibus, which was one of the first computer buses developed for microprocessors. Early boards designed by Dunn were PROM, RAM and character generator boards. Of these, character display boards such as the VT103 and VR107 were the best sellers, and were used in programmable read-only memory (PROM) programmers and similar systems. Karandanis, Datacube's President and CEO, in his early career followed the leaders in the semiconductor field from Bell Labs through Transitron to Fairchild. Karandanis was director of engineering at Monolithic Memories (MMI) when John Birkner and H.T. Chua designed the first successful programmable logic device, the programmable array logic (PAL) device. His contacts in the semiconductor field were instrumental in providing Datacube with leading-edge components for its products. An OEM asked Datacube if a frame grabber could be built on a Multibus board. At the time, a frame grabber was a large box with multiple boards. The VG120 was the first ever commercial single board frame grabber: based on programmable array logic (PAL), it had 320 x 240 x 6 bit resolution, grayscale video input and output. Karandanis hired Rashid Beg and Robert Wang from Matrox to develop the first Q-Bus (DEC LSI-11) frame grabber. They developed the QVG/QAF120 dual board, 8-bit product primarily for a new startup named Cognex. While the latter were developing the hardware for Datacube, they were also planning to spin off and form a competitor, Imaging Technology, which was later purchased by Dalsa. To recover from this loss, and to complete the QVG120 product, Dave Erickson was hired as a consultant in 1981 from Octek, by the engineering manager Paul Bloom. Dave came on full-time in 1982, as did Dave Simmons who was to head applications, and Bob Berger, who was to head software. At this time, Imaging Technology Inc. (ITI) was developing a line of frame grabber products for Multibus and Q-bus, with a 'real time' image processor based on a single point multiplier, adder and lookup table (LUT). In 1983, Karandanis hired Shep Siegel from Ampex, who had worked on the advanced and successful Ampex Digital Optics (ADO) real-time video spatial manipulator for the broadcast TV market. With Dunn's help, Simmons developed the VG123 Multibus and Q-bus frame grabber boards. During this development, Paul Bloom was killed in what was apparently a gangland style murder. The mystery of why this happened has never been solved. Dave Erickson was promoted to engineering manager to replace Bloom. Siegel came to add the SP123 image processor to the '123 family. But having worked on ADO, Siegel saw the limitations of the single-point architecture, and had a vision of what could be done by applying pipelined real-time imaging. He came with an understanding of digital signal processor devices (DSPs), image processing, filtering, and 2D warping, and with programmable logic in hand, saw what could be done. Erickson and Dunn had developed frame grabber boards deployed on most standard busses. Each potential new customer required features not currently available, and designing, laying out (using hand taped artwork) and manufacturing a board for a single customer was risky, slow and expensive. What was needed was a way to leverage the technology developed so that it could be applied to a wider customer base. Erickson felt that a modular architecture where functions could be easily added and a system tailored to a customers needs was critical. At this time, the VME bus was being introduced by Motorola for their Motorola 68000 processors. The automotive and military markets liked the VMEbus because it was open and rugged. Datacube developers embarked on a marketing road trip to visit potential customers in the medical, automotive and military markets to inquire what imaging functions they needed. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Datacube Inc.」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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