FireBird CoaXPress Frame Grabber (8xCXP12-3PE8) with end-bracket I/O

The FireBird 8xCXP-12 3PE8 IO frame grabber is a new addition to 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 utilizes RISC-based processor techniques, ensuring high-speed, low-latency image data transfers and zero CPU intervention.

The FireBird 8xCXP-12 3PE8 IO supports either two 4-connection CXP-6 cameras or four 2-connection CXP-6 cameras.

CoaXPress is a leading transmission standard for high-speed imaging in professional and industrial applications, which includes the fast CXP-10 and CXP-12 speeds (CoaXPress v2.0 and v2.1). Each CoaXPress connection supports up to 12.5 Gbps data rates, device power up to 13W, and device control at up to 42 Mbps – all on a single coaxial cable. The connections can be concatenated for faster devices 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 coaxial cable, or even longer lengths with thicker cables.

Active Silicon was one of the primary authors of the CoaXPress international standard. The standard is hosted by the JIIA (Japan Industrial Imaging Association).

FireBird is supported by Active Silicon’s software development kit, ActiveSDK. This is available separately 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, such as Windows and Linux (x86 and ARM, including NVIDIA Jetson). Drivers for third-party applications, such as Cognex VisionPro, HALCON, Common Vision Blox, StreamPix, LabVIEW, MATLAB etc. are available.

Full GenICam support is provided with the drivers, including a GenTL Producer for data streaming and register accesses. In addition to functions that control hardware, the libraries include general-purpose functions for manipulating and displaying images. A separate datasheet describes ActiveSDK in detail.

Future developments of this product will include support for one 8-connection CXP-6 camera and two 4-connection CXP-12 cameras in ping-pong mode (reading from one camera at a time).

This board is a variant of the FireBird 8xCXP-12 3PE8, only that a subset of the I/O is available right from the end bracket. The end-bracket I/Os are made accessible by a small Lemo connector (left/top image, red arrow) on the bracket. An optional adapter cable, Lemo to 15-way high-density D-Type connector (right image: board + cable), is available to translate signals to a Standard Active Silicon pinout.