Aug 01, 2001
St-Laurent, Quebec, July 16th, 2001 � Coreco Imaging, a leading developer of machine vision products, today introduced the Viper-CamLink, a high performance frame grabber based on the newly defined Camera Link standard. Camera Link is a communications interface between vision applications that ensures signal quality at data transfer rates up to 533 MB/s while reducing the complexity of cabling. Building on the success of the Viper series of embedded frame grabbers, the Viper-CamLink continues to add value to this new product line. The board interfaces to virtually any digital area and line-scan multi-tap cameras and allows data capture at high speeds (up to 200 MB/s) and supports resolutions from 32x32 to 64x256k.
"Its high speed and input resolution is ideally suited to meet the inspection challenges of the semiconductor industry's 300mm wafer sizes," said Philip Colet, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Coreco Imaging. "The Viper-CamLink also has the input required to acquire high resolution sub-micron images for semiconductor inspection applications."
Supports Eight Tap Cameras in Full Mode Operation
For high volume, large area, machine vision inspection processes, the Viper-CamLink supports digital cameras with up to eight, 8-bit taps. Based on Channel Link technology, Camera Link extends the functionality to include three modes of operations--Base, Medium and Full configuration. In addition, to typical Base and Medium configuration, the Viper-CamLink is one of the first frame grabbers to support Full implementation of the Camera Link specifications. The Full configuration permits data acquisition from eight, 8-bit taps or four, 10, 12, 16-bit taps, area and line-scan monochrome digital cameras. The Viper-CamLink is also capable of supporting 8, 10, or 12 RGB digital output cameras, making it the most flexible and fastest Camera Link-based frame grabber board available today.
The Viper-CamLink utilizes the Intel i960 RISC embedded processor and PCI interface device. An intelligent I/O controller, the i960 processor maximizes PCI performance by buffering images during busy cycles on the PCI bus. With up to 64MB of memory, the i960 also enables optimal usage of the system memory using scatter-gather DMA image transfers.
An essential part of the Coreco Imaging embedded imaging architecture framework, the Viper-CamLink integrates seemlessly with Coreco Imaging's high-speed Mamba-100, a Pentium III-based embedded vision processor board. The Mamba-100 is one hundred percent dedicated to compute-intensive, high-speed image processing tasks, freeing up the host computer by executing image-processing tasks directly on its embedded processor. The Viper-CamLink enhances image transfer bandwidth to the Mamba-100 beyond 132 MB/s using the Coreco Imaging Auxiliary Bus (CAB), an independent, high-speed 32-bit data transfer bus. The CAB system operates in two configurations allowing developers to adapt image-processing algorithms to leverage multiple, parallel processors or pipeline processing techniques to speed productivity.
The Viper-CamLink supports Coreco Imaging's pixel processor, a powerful daughter card optimized for the Viper-Series of intelligent frame grabbers. The pixel processor performs dedicated tasks in real-time and transfers subsequent results for further processing to the host computer or Mamba-100 via the CAB.
Comprehensive Software Support in a Familiar Windows Environment
The new Viper-CamLink operates with SAPERA, a hardware-independent, highly optimized imaging library designed to deliver all the components required to create comprehensive imaging solutions. SAPERA offers built-in support for MMX, Streaming SIMD Extension, ActiveX controls and DirectDraw. It features over 300-image processing and analysis functions and integrates seamlessly with Coreco Imaging's SMART series of application specific software libraries for pattern matching, optical character recognition and 1D and 2D bar and matrix codes. For developers requiring maximum flexibility when developing applications, the Viper-CamLink supports Microsoft Visual C/C++ 6.0 or higher under Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.
Price and Delivery
Priced at $3500, the Viper-CamLink will be available in August 2001.
About Coreco Imaging
Coreco Imaging is a leader in the design, development, manufacturing and marketing of hardware and software for high-performance computer vision applications, primarily in the medical imaging, machine vision and industrial inspection markets. The Company employs approximately 160 people and has operations in Montreal (QC), Ottawa (ON), Vancouver (BC) and Bedford (MA), with additional sales offices in Cleveland (OH) and San Juan Capistrano (CA). With over 150, 000 installations, Coreco Imaging has earned a worldwide reputation in technological leadership and aggressive price/performance. The company's frame grabbers and embedded vision engines feature such state-of-the-art innovations as ping-pong acquire and hardware scatter gather. Breakthrough software tools provide high-speed, high-precision pattern recognition despite changes in object/pattern size, orientation, shape, focus, or partial occlusion.
