• High Speed Scanning

• Fast, Flexible Printing

• Scale-to-Gray Display

• ISIS and TWAIN Compatible

• PowerTools™ for Windows

• ImageSoft™ C Libraries for DOS and OS/2

• Bar and Patch Code Recognition

• Image Enhancement

• Auto-Install and Configuration Utility

Xionics' Lightning family of image accelerators offer cost-effective, high performance scanning, printing and viewing of document images. The Lightning accelerators provide image compression and decompression, clear scale-to-gray display, and advanced image enhancement capacities for desktop imaging applications.

Lightning/Plus+ and Lightning/Scan drive the popular Fujitsu family of single-sided video interface scanners full speed at up to 40 pages per minute.

The Lightning image accelerators can scan, compress and write an image to disk while also scaling and displaying it. The cards can also start compressing an image to disk while the page is still being scanned.

Both cards drive popular single-sided document scanners at full speed, and are ISIS compatible and TWAIN compliant.

Lightnings use the industry-standard CCITT lossless compression algorithm to reduce the average monochrome letter-size image scanned at 300 dpi from about 1 MB to about 25 KB.

Value Added Processing

Lightning cards provide the advanced features needed for high-speed scanning, printing and image display quality. Lightning cards operate with Xionics' page separators to define the start and end of documents for batch scanning applications. Lightning cards also work with Xionics' bar and patch code recognition technology to support automatic identification and indexing of document images. Image enhancement for skew correction and removal of noise, lines, patterns and black edges is supported to improve the quality of scanned images and enhance character recognition. Lightnings also take advantage of the built-in IPC image processing features of Fujitsu scanners.

Operations can be pipelined to allow one image to decompress and print while another is read from disk.

Any Lightning can be used in conjunction with Xionics' XipPrint™ network image print accelerator for advanced network printing and acceleration.

All Lightnings use scale-to-gray image enhancement technology, pioneered by Xionics, to convert high resolution images to lower resolution 4-level or 16-level grayscale images. This provides sharp display on VGA monitors to 150 dpi dual-page grayscale displays in under a second.

Lightnings also use Xionics' virtual image technology to replace expensive dedicated on-board image memory with inexpensive field-upgradeable SIMMs as an image buffer.

Application Development Tools

In addition to working with off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped imaging applications, Xionics' family of Lightning image accelerators are supported by Xionics' award-winning PowerTools for Windows application development toolkit, featuring easy-to-use commands in a single DLL. Lightning cards are also supported by Xionics' ImageSoft C libraries for DOS and OS/2 environments.

Features and Configuration

• Proprietary DMA controller for high speed data transfer
• CCITT Group 3/4 compression and decompression
• Optional Bar Code Recognition
• Optional Image Enhancement
• Page Separator capability for Batch Scanning
• SIMMs for RAM expansion to 8 MB
• Hardware image scaling and orthogonal rotation
• Power consumption of 1.5A at 5V