Frame grabbers acquire images 6x faster than GigE, send power and control commands on single coax cable.

Positioning itself aggressively for leadership in the machine vision marketplace, BitFlow today launched its Karbon-CXP line of frame grabbers, one of the world's first to incorporate the CoaXPress (CXP) standard for moving high-speed serial data from a camera to a frame grabber. The result is video acquisition at blazing speeds up to 6 Gigabits per second, as well as the ability to send control commands and triggers at 20 Megabits per second - all over a single piece of 75 Ohm coaxial cable up to 135 meters. Additionally up to 13W of power can be transmitted to camera along the cable.

"The CXP standard opens the door to applications where cable cost, routing requirements and long distances have prevented the move to high resolution, high speed digital cameras," explained Donal Waide, Director of Sales for BitFlow. "In many cases, existing coaxial infrastructure can be repurposed for CXP with very low installation costs."

According to Waide, CoaXPress solves many of the problems of previous machine vision standards. For one, it eliminates the cost and distance restrictions of Camera Link cables. In addition, it provides a significant increase in quality, resolution and speed over analog, while maintaining its simple and flexible cabling. GigE also uses low cost and long distance capable cabling, but introduces trigger latency and determinism issues that CXP does not have. In fact, CXP has been proven to perform 6x faster than GigE. The Karbon-CXP achieves these advantages on an industry proven platform.

BitFlow Karbon-CXP frame grabbers are CoaXPress 1.0 compliant, and support from one to four CXP cameras, as well as support up to four CXP multi-links (up to four links per camera). Other keys to their success are:

• Supports CXP speeds from 1.250 to 6.250 Gb/S;
• Provides power for all cameras (up to 13 Watts per camera);
• Provides Safe Power, full protection from all power line faults;
• Cameras are Plug and Play with automatic link speed detection;
• Cameras can be accurately synchronized, or can be completely unsynchronized;
• PCI Express x8 interface (also works in x16 slots);
• Separate I/O for each camera;
• Highly deterministic, low latency frame grabber to camera trigger
• Supports simultaneous serial communications to all cameras.

Application Software
Like all BitFlow frame grabbers, adding the new Karbon-CXP to an application is simplified by an included SDK that supports both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. Applications can be developed using C/ C++/.NET and BitFlow's sophisticated buffer management APIs. In addition, free drivers can be downloaded from the BitFlow web site for most 3rd party machine vision packages. The Karbon models are software compatible with each other, as well as with all the other current BitFlow frame grabbers. This makes migrating applications from CameraLink or analog to CXP simple and quick.

Three Karbon-CXP models are available: single, dual and quad channel. All of the BitFlow frame grabbers are manufactured in the North East region of the United States