NEW COMPACT MPEG ENCODER FROM AITECH ALLOWS EFFICIENT, IN-THE FIELD VIDEO AND AUDIO COMPRESSION AND TRANSMISSION

Chatsworth, CA, September 2005 -- Aitech Defense Systems, Inc, a world leader in
the development and manufacture of board and subsystem level products for harsh
environment defense, aerospace and space applications, now offers a compact, realtime
MPEG video/audio encoder implemented on a standard PMC that efficiently
encodes either NTSC or PAL video into an MPEG-2 transport stream. The M503
encoder is ideal for both rugged and military applications using real time video/audio
compression. These include recording mission data in advanced target tracking
weapons systems and transmitting video/audio surveillance data in unmanned ground
and aerial reconnaissance vehicles.

The new M503, which employs an IBBP GOP video frame encoding mode at full
D1 resolution (CCIR-601, CCIR-656) with industry-standard stereo MPEG layer 2 audio,
enables in-the-field video and audio compression and transmission. The single-wide
M503 – fully compliant with IEEE 1386.1-2001 – features pause and resume encoding
as well as dynamic, user-defined encoder and video parameter adjustment to give
users more control of image transmission and quality. In addition, adaptive prediction
mode selection and frame/field DCT improve coding efficiency, especially for encoding
interlaced video. The new M503 offers refiltering and color format conversion of
4:2:2 to 4:2:0. A companion PMC product – the M550 – provides real-time MPEG
decompression to extract the video and audio data back to their original formats.
The M503 MPEG encoder consumes only 5W typical power in operation, features
12 MB of onboard RAM, supports 32-bit PCI bus operation at 33 MHz, and is fully
compliant with the PCI Rev. 2.1 specification. The new M503 also incorporates front
panel or backplane-based inputs.

Drivers supported include VxWorks and MS Windows 98 (vendor-supplied reference
drivers). The M503 employs a universal PMC interface that supports both +5V and
+3.3V PCI universal signaling levels, and is available in both air-cooled and
conduction-cooled versions.