PXI frame grabber claims to offer industry's highest throughput

NI claims that its PXIe-1435 is the industry's highest-throughput PXI frame grabber and acquires from all Camera Link camera configurations, including 10-tap extended-full, with up to 850MB/s of throughput. Engineers can power cameras through Power over Camera Link (PoCL)-enabled cables, which eliminates the need for additional wires. The frame grabber also offers 512MB of DDR2 onboard acquisition memory for added reliability in transferring large images without fear of data overflow. Onboard digital I/O includes four bidirectional transistor-transistor logic (TTL), two opto-isolated inputs and one quadrature encoder for triggering and communicating inspection results with automation devices.

Furthermore, the frame grabber incorporates the synchronisation, timing, data streaming and processing capabilities of the PXI Express specification, and supports image processing on complementary field-programmable gate array (FPGA) boards to further boost system performance.

High-end test systems

Matt Friedman, National Instruments Senior Product Manager for the PXI platform and PXISA board member, comments: "The NI PXIe-1435 frame grabber further complements our capabilities in the PXI platform. The addition of high-performance imaging to our PXI offerings enhances our mixed-signal capabilities for high-end test systems."

The high throughput and low latency of the Camera Link standard make the frame grabber suitable for line-scan image sensors, which can be used for surface inspection of large areas, including finding aesthetic and functional defects in solar panels and dead pixels in flat panel displays. The NI PXIe-1435 frame grabber also works well in many industrial applications, such as fault analysis using a stop trigger to record images before and after an event on the factory floor, and medical device applications such as analysing intricacies in movement and recording stimulus responses in objects from heart valves to eye corneas.

Engineers can program the new module using NI LabVIEW graphical development software and the NI Vision Development Module, a comprehensive library of imaging functions. They can also configure it using NI Vision Builder for Automated Inspection software, an easy-to-use, standalone package for fast development and simple maintenance. NI vision software helps engineers take advantage of hundreds of imaging processing algorithms, make decisions based on multiple inspection results, customise user interfaces and communicate results using I/O and industrial communication protocols.

Go to www.ni.com/vision for more information about the new NI PXIe-1435 high-performance Camera Link frame grabber and other NI vision products.