In the design of a front end of a real time image fusion system

a high speed

high integrated

general purpose video signal grabbing system has been developed by using one integrated video decoder

a large scale EPLD device. The EPLD device is configured by a program written in the VHDL language. The grabbing system can provide randomly continually data buffer memory access without waiting by using two buffer memory banks

which map to same address space. The grab parameters

for example

the beginning point

the dimension of grab window

can be change on line. It has following advantages: high integration and reliability

small dimensions

simple interfaces and in system programmability

etc. The system can be realized in one EPM7064SLC84 EPLD device without I 2C interface. The full function EPLD chip with I 2C interface is implemented in one EPM7160SLC84 and successfully applied to a multi channel image grabbing and fusion system. The on chip resource usage rate is 80%. On the other hand

the design can be also applied to the other image processing systems as a high integrated video signal grabbing front end without hardware change. The need change can be implemented by change the VHDL program which configures the EPLD device.