The Alvis-PCIe media processing board is a member of the award-winning Odin Telecom Frameworks (OTX) product family. The Alvis-PCIe offers the most processing power for demanding VoIP and video streaming applications , soft-switch systems, media gateways, transcoding systems (e.g. Asterisk® voice transcoding accelerator), and similar applications.

The Alvis-PCIe is a PCI-Express (1x lane) card with popular interfaces such as Gigabit Ethernet, H.100 and PCI-Express.

The processor engine of the board is a cluster of the the DaVinci TMS320DM6443 Digital Media processor from

Texas Instruments. The Alvis-PCIe board can be populated with up to eight of these powerful dual core processors providing an astonishing amount of processing power which facilitates decoding of up to 4000 RTP streams.

Voice or video packets can be routed via the on-board Ethernet switch to the appropriate processor. The processor can perform decoding and decoding functions. The result can either be transferred to the Ethernet port or routed to another OTX board via the on-board H.100 bus.

Each of the dual core processors on the Alvis-PCIe 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 DSP core runs DSP/BIOS (xDM codecs) and handles all real-time encoding and decoding operations.

The open architecture of the Alvis-PCIe 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.