Very fast and flexible: DMA900 and SmartApplets
Silicon Software is extending its product range for two new developments

With the DMA900 technology the data transfer rate between frame grabber and the host PC’s RAM memory was sped up dramatically.

With a transfer performance of 900 MB/s all Camera Link standards are supported and transferred completely. Like this Silicon Software’s PCIe x4 Camera Link boards are the fastest frame grabbers on the market. Its specialty is transferring the data through one single DMA channel. Due to this a later reconstruction of the images is no longer required. For reaching this date rate a modern mainboard is required.

With SmartApplets a new product line was developed that completely calculates complex pre-processing steps on the frame grabber’s on-board processor. SmartApplets were developed as application-related partial solution. This implements image acquisition, to image enhancements to image processings and other frequently needed processing steps in high algorithmic quality. As the processing takes place on the FPGA vision processor it is calculated in real time without loading the host CPU. With the two available SmartApplets families binarization and object segmentation/ classification, area- and line-scan cameras for Camera Link and GigE vision are supported. SmartApplets contain modular functional blocks that can be switched on or off and are configured instead of programmed.

Example of a SmartApplet from the object segmentation/ classification family:

Image acquisition with image enhancements via a lookup table, noise reduction with the help of a median filter, adaptive binarization via large kernel filters, a two-step morphological image processing for reducing interfering fragments, an object segmentation with help of a blob analysis function and an object classification by feature extraction. Both the original image and the filtered image objects can be transferred.