Press release Messe Stuttgart
November 2006 / Nr. 5

VISION-Award goes to Mannheim
Programming Processors without Hardware Knowledge

Winner of this year's VISION-Award is Silicon Software from Mannheim. The company could stand up to competing companies with the graphical tool VisualApplets for the Machine Vision award. The award was appointed on November 7th during the VISION exhibition, the international trade fair for machine vision and identification technologies in Stuttgart.

Requests of the customers to achieve an access on the vision processor hardware to have a short reaction time for modifications and a better protec-tion of the development's know-how were motives for the development of VisualApplets.

"This tool uses an easy-to-handle graphical user interface, which allows programming and modifying FPGA processors without special hardware knowledge by the customers themselves. The software is focussed on application engineers in first priority", explains Dr. Klaus-Henning Noffz, Executive Manager of Silicon Software and winner of the VISION-Awards 2006, which is endowed with 2000 Euro. "The programming will be dramatically eased and accelerated." The VISION-Award was presented for the 14th time in this year. It honours exceptional innovative products, system solutions or processes in Applied Machine Vision.

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215 exhibitors and 20 represented companies are registered at the VISION 2006 from the 7. to 9. November. This is a growth of 7 percent compared to the last year. Also grown is the share of exhibitors from abroad for 2 percent to 42 percent in total. 22 countries are represented. Most of the exhibitor's contingent comes from USA, followed by Greatbritain, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland. Components and systems for Machine Vision are exhibited in first priority. These products will be mostly used for quality inspection of production processes. Application fields are the inspection of drill holes, welding seams or complete assemblies, as well as inspection of infinitive objects like metals, foams, textiles or papers. It is added by non-industrial applications, a sector, which strongly wins market shares at the moment. Next VISION 2007 will take place from 6. to 8. November on the area of the New Stuttgart Trade Fair Centre.