Camera Link HS speeds inspection applications
The AIA chose The Vision Show held in Boston last week to formally release version 1.0 of the Camera Link High Speed (CLHS) standard and to announce that a CLHS IP core would be available May 31. Bob McCurrach, the AIA's director of standards development, announced the standard would be available free from the AIA web site. Mike Miethig, Teledyne DALSA R&D manager and chair of AIA CLHS committee, described how the standard will serve demanding machine-vision and inspection applications.
The new standard, said Miethig, speaking at The Vision Show, offers plenty of bandwidth to support real-time, frame-by-frame camera control for reliable, error-free operation. In addition to offering greater bandwidth than earlier Camera Link specifications, the new standard offers longer distances. Miethig noted that users aren't restricted to single sources for interconnect hardware; Camera Link relies on off-the-shelf transmission technology, including CX4 Infiniband electrical connectors and SFP/SFP+ fiber-optic components.
As for specifics, Miethig said the new standard supports data rates and camera-to-frame-grabber distances ranging from 300 MB/s at 10 m over copper to 1200 MB/s at 10,000 m over fiber. The standard offers 3.2-ns jitter to support real-time triggering; latency is on the order of 100 to 300 ns.
Miethig noted the reliability offered by the standard, saying, “We put a lot of emphasis on this—I can't stress that enough.” The reliability stems from such features as two-of-three voting techniques and CRC-32 redundancy checks with resend capability for video frames. Fiber-optic implementations, he said, will offer inherent immunity to EMI.
When released on May 31, the IP core, Miethig said, will be FPGA-ready, initially supporting devices from Altera and Xilinx. The core, which implements the CLHS message layer, will be available in RTL VHDL format.
The AIA chose The Vision Show held in Boston last week to formally release version 1.0 of the Camera Link High Speed (CLHS) standard and to announce that a CLHS IP core would be available May 31. Bob McCurrach, the AIA's director of standards development, announced the standard would be available free from the AIA web site. Mike Miethig, Teledyne DALSA R&D manager and chair of AIA CLHS committee, described how the standard will serve demanding machine-vision and inspection applications.
The new standard, said Miethig, speaking at The Vision Show, offers plenty of bandwidth to support real-time, frame-by-frame camera control for reliable, error-free operation. In addition to offering greater bandwidth than earlier Camera Link specifications, the new standard offers longer distances. Miethig noted that users aren't restricted to single sources for interconnect hardware; Camera Link relies on off-the-shelf transmission technology, including CX4 Infiniband electrical connectors and SFP/SFP+ fiber-optic components.
As for specifics, Miethig said the new standard supports data rates and camera-to-frame-grabber distances ranging from 300 MB/s at 10 m over copper to 1200 MB/s at 10,000 m over fiber. The standard offers 3.2-ns jitter to support real-time triggering; latency is on the order of 100 to 300 ns.
Miethig noted the reliability offered by the standard, saying, “We put a lot of emphasis on this—I can't stress that enough.” The reliability stems from such features as two-of-three voting techniques and CRC-32 redundancy checks with resend capability for video frames. Fiber-optic implementations, he said, will offer inherent immunity to EMI.