FireBird CoaXPress over Fiber Frame Grabber (4xCOF-12-3PE8)

The FireBird CoaXPress over Fiber 4xCOF-12 frame grabber is a member of Active Silicon’s state-of-the-art FireBird frame grabber family.

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

Active Silicon was one of the primary authors of the international CoaXPress standard, which is hosted by the JIIA (Japan Industrial Imaging Association). CoaXPress over Fiber (COF) is an extension of the CoaXPress Machine Vision standard for high-speed imaging in professional and industrial applications. CoaXPress over Fiber allows the CoaXPress protocol to run over a fiber optic cable.

The fiber optic cables and connectors needed for transmission are sourced from mainstream Ethernet technology (40 Gigabit Ethernet), which keeps their costs to a minimum and availability plentiful. Using fiber optics for communications has significant benefits where long cable runs are required or cameras are placed in harsh electrical environments. With the correct choice of cable and optical transceiver module, cameras can be placed multiple kilometers from the frame grabber/PC.

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 and Linux (64-bit, incl. ARM environments). Drivers for third-party applications are also available, such as Cognex VisionPro, HALCON, Common Vision Blox, StreamPix, LabVIEW, MATLAB etc.

Full GenICam support is provided with the frame grabber drivers and this includes a GenTL Producer for data streaming as well as register accesses. In addition 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.

The FireBird CoaXPress over Fiber 4xCOF-12 frame grabber is also available with data forwarding functionality. Here, a second QSFP+ connector allows data forwarding (Aurora, CoaXPress over Fiber formats) for daisy-chained data-processing applications.

Active Silicon also provides a complete vision solution for the CoaXPress over Fiber interface. The Oncilla Machine Vision Computer – CoaXPress over Fiber combines a rugged machine vision industrial PC system with an integrated 4XCOF-12 frame grabber.

For fiber optic cable solutions, please see below under related products or visit our accessories & cables page.