Xionics XIP-D Image Processor
This card's ID is 6B2C. Peter Wendt's QBMCA
utility knows it, and displays a [!] notation, indicating that the
adapter either shares an ID with another or was sold under a variety of
brand names. (What adapter is like this one or shares the card-ID?)
I'd still be very much interested in finding the adapter definition file (ADF) for this board. Tell me
if you happen to have it, or would like to share any information about
this board. Thanks to Jeff White for supplying information about what
this board does, and how it would have been used.
Here's another adapter without component markings on all the parts. Most of the component IDs are totally made up.
IC35~70 are Texas Instruments TMS4C1024DJ 100ns RAM chips (wow...)
IC71 is an empty DIP socket
ES2 - European Semiconductor Structures 06117QD1 ASIC (ES2 was purchased by Atmel in 1995.)
TIGA - Texas Instruments TMS34010FNL-50 (DSP/image processor)
Chips - Chips & Technologies P82C611 MCA bus interface
Hitachi - Hitachi HD63085Y (Digital Signal Processor - LSI Encoder/Decoder, 32MHz)
OSC - 32.0000MHz
CON1 - Daughtercard
CON2 - This is likely a means for adapter memory expansion. See commentary below.
Daughtercard
CON1 - 68 pin male connector for main board. Looks like a 68-pin F/W SCSI plug.
CON2 and 3 are very small Centronics-style female connectors. These are likely connections for a scanner and/or printer.
U11 - Signetics SCC2692AC1A44 DUART
RP1, 2 - Resistor networks
XTAL - 3.68 (MHz?)
Usage and Purpose
Jeff White wrote up a nice explanation of this board and its intended use.
I saw your web page about a Xionics board and were asking what it does.
I probably used this board back around 1991 or 1992. It's a
co-processor board for driving a printer and a scanner. The TIGA
processor was used to do manipulations of scanned or loaded images and
other processing. One of the chips on the board, probably the
ASIC also did FAX Group III and IV compression/decompression. The
connectors on the daughtercard were to interface to the Canon printer
engine on a LaserJet and the other connector was usually to hook up to
a scanner.
They could have up to 16MB of RAM. I think it had 8MB on the main
board and you could add another 8MB with the rear daughter
connector.
It was an expensive board, probably around $2K or $3K back in 1991.
I'm fairly certain it would not drive a display. That would be done by another card, like an XGA or 8514/A.
Kofax was their main competitor at the time, we also used their boards.
Mr. White later wrote with a bit more information and some history:
Now that I recall more, the back connector on the card was probably for
additional memory. You could install, for the time, a fairly
phenomenal amount of RAM - say 16MB. We build some PC's that one
of these boards, a Kofax display board, SCSI controller, WORM drive,
Ethernet, etc. They were very expensive machines. The worst
machines to deal with for us were the PS/2. They were very
troublesome in shoe horning all of the shared memory above 640K needed
by MCA for these devices. Sometimes it was impossible to make
some board combinations work, as there was not enough memory space that
it would allow you to configure.
On the ISA machines, they were usually more lax about memory configurations.
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