The Automated Imaging Association (AIA; Ann Arbor, MI, USA) has announced that the Camera Link High Speed (HS) technical committee has released Intellectual Property (IP) cores for the M and X protocols of the standard. The M protocol supports 3.125 Gbps links, while the X protocol supports 10 Gbps links.
The AIA claims that the IP cores could save as much as six months development time by providing development teams a ready-to-use reference implementation.
The FPGA-ready cores implement the message layer of the Camera Link HS standard for both camera and frame grabber devices. They can be used on Altera and Xilinx FPGAs, as well as extended to other FPGA technologies.
Each of the cores -- which are compliant with revision 1.0 of the Camera Link HS standard -- include a VHDL/Java test bench, Modelsim simulator, core user guide and a validation user guide.
The cores can be purchased directly from the AIA a cost of $1000 per core. To buy the core, designers need to submit an IP core purchase request form from the AIA which can be found here. Once the request form has been received, a Camera Link HS IP core solution license agreement will be sent via email. After signing and returning the agreement and payment, the core, or cores, will then be dispatched.
Designers interested in implementing the Camera Link HS interface might also be interested to read a recent technical paper written by Max Robertson, an analog applications engineer at Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX, USA), and Mike Miethig, the technical manager of Teledyne Dalsa (Billerica, MA, USA).
Entitled "Implementing a Camera Link HS interface using the TLK3134," it can be found here.
Recent articles on Camera Link HS from Vision Systems Design that you might also find of interest
1. Is Camera Link High Speed the ultimate interface?
Donal Waide of BitFlow details the timeline of interface standards development, compares their implementation, and ponders whether there is a clear “winner” that may become most commonly used in the future.
2. Looking to the future of vision
CoaXPress and Camera Link HS differ radically in their designs, with the former being more of a hardware-only implementation while the latter requires a hardware and software (IP) approach.
-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
