FireBird CoaXPress Frame Grabber (4xCXP12-3PE4)

The FireBird Quad CXP-12 3PE4 frame grabber is one of the the latest members of Active Silicon’s state-of-the-art FireBird frame grabber family.

FireBird is designed for ultimate performance using Active Silicon’s proprietary DMA Engine technology, “ActiveDMA”. This technical innovation applies RISC based processor techniques and guarantees high speed and low latency image data transfers and zero CPU intervention.

The FireBird Quad CXP-12 3PE4 supports one 2-connection camera or two 1-connection cameras up to CXP-12 for simultaneous streaming. For support up to CXP-6, one 4-connection camera, two 2-connection cameras or up to four 1-connection cameras can be connected.

CoaXPress is a leading transmission standard for high-speed imaging in professional and industrial applications, which now includes the faster CXP-10 and CXP-12 speeds. Each CoaXPress connection supports up to 12.5 Gbps data rates, along with device power up to 13W and device control at up to 42 Mbps – all on a single coax cable. For faster devices, the connections can be concatenated to provide multiples of the single coax bandwidth. Very long cable lengths are supported – up to 35m at 12.5 Gbps and 100m at 3.125 Gbps using Belden 1694A cable – or even longer lengths using thicker cables. Active Silicon was one of the primary authors of the CoaXPress international standard, which is hosted by the JIIA (Japan Industrial Imaging Association).

FireBird is supported by Active Silicon’s software development kit, ActiveSDK. This is available as a separate item and allows rapid system development and integration. It provides comprehensive example applications and optimized libraries, and supports a variety of operating systems via a common API, including Windows, Linux (64-bit environments) and QNX. Drivers for third party applications are also available, such as Cognex VisionPro, HALCON, Common Vision Blox, StreamPix, LabVIEW etc.

Full GenICam support is included in the drivers and this includes a GenTL Producer for data streaming as well as register accesses. Additional to functions that control the hardware, the libraries include general purpose functions for the manipulation and display of images. A separate datasheet describes ActiveSDK in detail.