Supported hardware

ActiveAG was designed to support the Alliance Generation (AG) series of hardware manufactured by Natural MicroSystems Corporation.

The AG hardware line is printed circuit cards that can be installed in the ISA slots of your PC. These cards come in a number of configurations. These configurations vary by the number of ports (telephone circuits) supported, the types of telephone circuit interfaces provided (analog or digital), and whether daughtercards may be used. All in all, there is a great deal of flexibility and scalability in the Alliance Generation hardware line and consequently a large number of different possible configurations.

This is a partial list of Natural MicroSystems AG cards:

AG-880 - supports eight analog telephone circuits.

AG-T1 - supports one T1 digital telephone circuit.

AG-E1 - supports one E1 digital telephone circuit.

AG-24 - acts as a DSP resource for up to 24 analog telephone circuits (requires separate line interface card[s]).

AG-30 - acts as a DSP resource for up to 24 analog telephone circuits (requires separate line interface card[s]).

AG-RT – a DSP resource daughtercard which is used in NMS’ Fusion ™ line.

ActiveAG supports all of the cards listed above, so long as they are properly configured. For complete information on the NMS Alliance Generation hardware line, visit http://www.nmss.com.

There are several types of daughter cards manufactured by Natural MicroSystems that can be used to provide additional DSP resources. These daughter cards cards have no bus connectors; instead they are mounted on (attached to) another NMS card that connects to the computer’s bus. Since daughter cards make no difference in using ActiveAG, they are not discussed further here.

The ways in which AG cards are configured depend on whether they offer DSP (digital signal processor) resources, line interface resources (places to connect telephone circuits), or both. A complete description of the possibilities is far beyond the scope of this document, but some brief examples are presented here.

For example, the AG-880 offers both DSP and line interfaces on the same card. This means the AG-880 can have telephone circuits connected directly to it and it provides the digital signal processing power that drives those lines. The AG-24, on the other hand, offers only DSP resources and has no facility for connecting telephone circuits. In this case, the AG-24 might be used with an ATI-24. The ATI-24 card provides the line interface resources needed to serve the AG-24’s DSP resources.

Cards that offer only one resource or the other must be connected to cards providing the other resource. Continuing with the example of the AG-24, it must be connected to a card providing line terminations (ATI-24 or others) in order to have a signal path between the telephone circuits and the DSP’s. Typically, the connections between cards with different resources are made using some switching service software. The switching software used with NMS cards is based on the MVIP (Multi-Vendor Integration Protocol) standard. MVIP is an industry standard supported by GO-MVIP, the Global Organization for MVIP. For more information about MVIP, visit http://www.mvip.org.

Currently, since ActiveAG doesn’t directly support MVIP configuration, the MVIP connections between resources must be established before your ActiveAG program will run correctly. This can be done by using the SW utility from NMS, for example. Since MVIP connections are generally static this task can be done at system boot time and then left without further changes.

A future version of ActiveAG will feature direct support for making and breaking MVIP connections between hardware resources. Because MVIP is an industry standard, this will allow you to use ActiveAG to control MVIP resources on NMS cards and on other MVIP-compliant resource cards sold by other vendors.