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repair robots or oil and gas pipe inspection. ‘Tey want to be driving small robots down pipes with long cables, and they’ve got a copper infrastructure using analogue low-resolution technology that they want to change to HD, so we see opportunities there,’ he explained. Along with the frame grabbers, a significant
COM Express-based embedded system
based on the ISA bus, which was relatively slow. Ten PCI came along in the 1990s and PCI Express aſter that. ‘Te evolution of the computer bus has been a key aspect and also an enabling technology that has allowed frame grabbers to not really be frame grabbers anymore – the name frame grabber is an old fashioned misnomer now,’ Pearce continued. ‘Te first products we made did capture
video frames and transfer them across the bus, but you couldn’t do it in real time. Faster buses were a bit of a revolution; you could now stream live video straight into system memory. Tat’s essentially what we still do, with a bit of image processing on the way.’ Te speeds are much quicker and PCB
layout has become a significant specialist area. ‘Now, the electronics need to be analysed in sophisticated CAD environments to make sure the PCB tracking is going to work at the speeds required,’ he added. Pearce observed that every new piece of
technology brings with it opportunities as well as threats. He recalled that when Gigabit Ethernet – and a few years’ later GigE Vision – came out, everyone predicted the death of the frame grabber. GigE Vision, however, wasn’t fast enough for many applications, and there was still a place for acquisition products at the high- end, which is where Active Silicon positions itself – it offers Camera Link, HD-SDI, LVDS, and CoaXPress frame grabbers. ‘We are seeing history repeat itself with 10GigE, and while the technology will work for some areas, it is tricky to compete with a dedicated technology such as CoaXPress,’ Pearce said. In 2008, manufacturer Adimec approached Active Silicon to work on a new interface
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standard that would become CoaXPress, the high-speed video transmission standard designed to run over coaxial cables. Adimec, Active Silicon and the semiconductor company Eqcologic, later bought by Microchip, led the CoaXPress consortium. When Adimec proposed the idea, ‘we said this looks interesting technology’, Pearce recalled; ‘we want to be at the forefront, we want to be doing the fastest boards, we’ll be involved.’ CoaXPress won the Vision
Award in 2009 and is now a significant portion of Active Silicon’s business, according to Pearce. ‘It [CoaXPress] has been slower to take off than we expected,’ he said, ‘although now there are quite a few OEMs taking decent volumes – probably about a 50:50 mix with Camera Link in terms of revenue at the high-end. Established companies are wary of change, so they have tended to stick with Camera Link because it’s a simple, long- established technology, but it’s running out of steam with the speeds that are available.’ Pearce also pointed to markets in remote
surveillance – for instance, surveillance on nuclear plants – where there are still a lot of analogue cameras installed. He sees an opportunity in moving some of these more specialist industrial surveillance applications to an HD platform. Active Silicon will launch a product at the
Vision trade fair in Stuttgart in November that transmits HD video over long cable lengths for remote surveillance applications. One of the target markets is pipe inspection, in sewer
amount of Active Silicon’s revenue is from embedded vision systems – almost half of the company’s revenue comes from custom embedded PCs, which has been the case for many years. Tese industrial PCs are built into medical machines, for instance. Te embedded PCs are designed to last a long time, and are not subject to the rapid changes found in the consumer PC market. Pearce views the more recent trend of system-
The barrier to entry for the sort of products we’re doing was far less when we started than it is today
on-chips and using small, powerful compute boards to engineer distributed vision systems as important for the company, but one that is yet to yield significant revenue streams. Te company is working on running one of its embedded automation products – currently based on a custom embedded PC – on an Arm platform, and it’s refining the method of cross-compiling the algorithms to run on Linux. ‘Video over IP is a massive market and we’re looking at ways we can expand some of our products into that market with the embedded technology,’ Pearce said. ‘In the future there will be
the compute platform – which will be a system-on-chip – and then there will be a sensor,’ he continued. ‘Tis could affect the frame grabber business, because who needs a PC and a frame grabber when we can
use a system-on-chip?’ He said there’s a threat to the frame grabber business and to embedded PCs, as well as camera manufacturers generally, but there are also opportunities. ‘We’re familiar with how to work with this emerging small, form-factor embedded technology – it’s using Xilinx and Arm parts, and we can cross-compile our SDKs to run on Arm. We also support the Nvidia Jetson GPU-based processor; we do quite a lot of work with GPUs.’ Pearce noted that the embedded compute
boards can also run neural networks, which is what the company will be able to do with its yet- to-be-released embedded Zynq-based product. ‘We can apply some of the deep learning kits to that because there’s plenty of FPGA resource.’ Aſter 30 years in business, FPGA technology remains key for Active Silicon. O
August/September 2018 • Imaging and Machine Vision Europe 15
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