FPGA-based frame grabbers for image acquisition

Stemmer Imaging can now offer what are said to be the world's fastest FPGA-based Cameralink frame grabbers from Silicon Software, which are suited as an OEM solution for image acquisition.

The AD4-CL and VD4-CL are part of the Microenable IV range of frame grabbers.

They are both PCIe x4 Cameralink frame grabbers featuring the DMA 900 FPGA engine, offering data-transfer rates of 900MB/s to the host PC for image acquisition.

This allows the users to take full advantage of the fastest Cameralink cameras with no data loss.

The Microenable IV VD4-CL features an additional FPGA vision processor, which provides fast image processing independently of the host CPU.

FPGA designs can be quickly and easily programmed and tested using Silicon Software's Visualapplets programming environment.

Visualapplets eliminates the need for expert FPGA programming and provides flexible image-processing functionality for software developers, plus rapid application development for developers and FPGA engineers.

Both boards support dual independent base, single medium or single full Cameralink cameras.

They also support add-ons such as the CLIO interface, which is used for data redistribution and the Trigger digital IO interface, which enables the integration of peripheral devices such as encoders or lighting.

A Pixelplant interface is also available for the VD4-CL to provide additional hardware resources for the more complex image-processing tasks.

Other boards in the Microenable IV range offer Power over Cameralink (PoCL) and mini PoCL on a base Cameralink interface, as well as providing support for Linux and QNX in addition to Windows.

The latest version of Visualapplets provides GUI access to more than 200 operators from machine vision libraries for real-time image and signal processing on the FPGA vision processor.

Image-processing functionality includes sensor corrections, image enhancement, colour processing, filtering and arithmetic operations.

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