Interface card takes GigE vision onboard

Matrox Imaging has launched its first interface card for the GigE Vision standard. 'There is a lot of industry awareness surrounding GigE Vision these days, as you would expect when a new promising digital standard emerges for machine vision', says Dwayne Crawford, Product Manager at Matrox Imaging. 'And launching the Solios GigE underscores our commitment to our customers, that they will be able to take advantage of the latest technology in the most optimal fashion'.

Matrox Solios GigE is a high-performance interface that fully supports the GigE Vision standard, while offering superior value over generic NICs.

The Matrox Solios GigE is a x4 PCI Express (PCIe) short card with four gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports and a full range of auxiliary onboard I/O.

By supporting a trigger input directly on the Matrox Solios instead of relying on the camera, for example, the application will always have the required information to react appropriately at critical points, such as what to do in the event of a missed trigger.

Furthermore, onboard I/O eliminates the need to purchase additional boards for integrating the use of rotary encoders and more.

For applications that must perform intensive computational operations such as flat field correction, the Matrox Solios GigE offers an optional, configurable FPGA-based processing core that can offload and even accelerate image processing operations from the host CPU.

Based on the Altera Stratix family of FPGA devices, the FPGA includes a sizable amount of DDR SDRAM and/or a smaller amount of faster QDR SRAM to maximise the performance of image processing tasks.

Software support includes the MIL/Active-MIL or MIL-Lite/ActiveMIL-Lite development kits under Microsoft Windows XP.

Included with these development toolkits are ready-made configurations for the FPGA-based processing core that implement a wide variety of image processing functions.

Custom configurations and processing functions can also be created using the Matrox FPGA Developer's Toolkit (FDK) Altera Edition.