Odin TeleSystems introduced the Alvis-ASM product family to provide the ultimate industry solution for voice (VoIP) and video streaming applications (TVoIP) essential for soft-switch systems, media gateways and transcoding applications. The Alvis-ASM solution is based on Texas Instruments' dual core DaVinci TMS320DM6443 Digital Media processors. These processors provide an astonishing amount of processing power which facilitates transcoding of up to 256 channels.

The Alvis-ASM is a daughter card which is designed to be populated on any Odin Telecom FrameworX (OTX) PCI/PCIe board of revision 2.0 or later. Packets containing voice or video transferred via the 10/100/1000 Ethernet port can easily be decoded and encoded and routed to bidirectional TDM channels of the H.100 bus of the OTX base board or to any of its telecom transceivers (e.g. E1/T1). Alvis-ASM is a perfect match for the OTX Thor-8-PCI-Plus boards which is equipped with eight E1/T1/J1spans (256 bidirectional channels). For transcoding systems without TDM streams, up to two Alvis-ASM boards can be populated on the Modi-PCI/PCI ASM carrier board.

Each of the dual core processors on the Alvis-ASM consists of one ARM9 core and one DSP C64x+ core. For optimum performance, the work load is split between the two cores. The ARM core runs the MontaVista Linux operating system and handles higher layer stacks like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and TCP/IP. The DSPcore runs DSP/BIOS (xDM codecs) and handles all real-time encoding/decoding operations.

The open architecture of the Alvis-ASM provides system designers with the building blocks needed to build a very powerful soft-switch or media gateway application, yet providing full flexibility for customization.