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About phase 5 digital products
 phase 5 digital products was a hardware manufacturing company founded in 1992 and 100% privately held by it's founders
Gerald W. Carda and Wolf Dietrich. The company started as a dedicated hardware developer and manufacturer of Amiga add-ons, and became a leading vendor of CPU Accelerators,
Graphic Expansion Boards and SCSI Controllers for the Amiga platform, who shipped some 60,000 products into this market since late 1995. Leading products and innovations such as the first 68060 Accelerators for Amiga computers,
the first 32-bit Zorro-III DMA SCSI controllers for A3000/A4000 systems, the succesful Blizzard series of inexpensive high-quality accelerators for A1200 and A2000 systems, or the powerful CyberVision Graphic card family and the
CyberGraphX V3 RTG standard define the milestones of development for which the company received 20 Product of the Year Awards by leading magazines since 1992. With new development projects integrating the PowerPC RISC
processor into accelerator boards for Amiga computers as well as Apple Macintosh systems, and the new ASE (Advanced Silicon Engineering) Group which is assigned to ASIC research and development phase 5 digital products
underscores it's company profile as a highly innovative company, which is based on the business philosophy that continous product innovation is the key for a succesful future, and that a market for alternative technology will continue
to exist.
 phase 5 digital products was located in Oberursel, Germany, approximately 10 minutes away from Frankfurt and 15 minutes away
from the Rhein-Main International Airport. In it's headquarters, which cover 960 squaremeter office space on two floors of a modern office building a team of about 20 employees (not considering external software developers)
was working in the departments development, sales, service and support. In an additional service area covering appx. 600 square meters the phase 5 Elektronikfertigung GmbH, a sister company founded in 1996, provided high-quality
electronics manufacturing with an additonal staff of 7 employees. As an overview, the phase 5 group currently focuses on the following operations:
Amiga Hardware Development, Distribution and Support
phase 5 digital products remains to be dedicated to the Amiga computer and the Amiga community, with the goal to support the active user base with powerful and innovative products. As a major breakthrough
phase 5 digital products was going to introduce a new series of advanced PowerPC based accelerators, which operate as dual-processor systems in order to offer breath-taking performance enhancements combined with a 100%
compatibility to the existing OS and applications. With a strong support for software developers worldwide by providing development systems and tools phase 5 digital products actively supported the introducion of a new software
generation that can make use of the significant performance increases which are possible with the PowerUp Accelerators.
MacIntosh add-on development and distribution
Using it's comprehensive design know-how and the experience with 68k and PowerPC processors, phase 5 digital products created a series of PowerPC Accelerator Boards for Apple Macintosh Computers, which
were succesfully introduced to the market. As a spin-off of other technology projects, phase 5 digital products planed to expand the Macintosh add-on product portfolio in the future.
System Design and Development
Preparing the step from a vendor of hardware add-on products to a computer system vendor, phase 5 digital products took an extraordinary approach by starting the design of a new and innovative computer
system under the project name A\\BOX. A major aspect of the design goals for this system was the realisation and integration of innovative design concepts which were not found in standard PC or Macintosh compatibles, by use of
custom chips especially designed for this system (see below).
ASIC Development
Following the philosophy that real innovation today and in the future can only be realized on chip level, phase 5 digital products had set up it's ASE (Advanced Silicon Engineering) Group in 1996. This group did
ASIC reaearch and design, and was assigned to innovative projects such as the CAIPIRINHA custom chip development, which are considered to be the key projects for the future development of the company and it's products such as
the A\\BOX computer system.
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