At VISION 2016, two people that I had the pleasure of speaking to were Michael Noffz, Head of Marketing, and Mike Faulkner, Director of Business Development and Sales for Silicon Software. During our conversation, we talked about the latest version of the company’s VisualApplets integrated FPGA development environment, and how the product can be used to improve applications with high speed, high bandwidth, and low latency requirements.
VisualApplets 3 is a 64-bit development environment to graphically program FPGA processors. The product simplifies the programming of image processing applications on FPGA processors for frame grabbers, industrial cameras, and image processing devices via data flow models, without using a hardware description language (HDL) and without any FPGA knowledge.
"Most people know what FPGAs do, but not everyone uses them because of how difficult and specialized they are to code," said Faulkner. "We preprocess data via FPGAs in real-time which minimizes the amount of data going into the PCIe bus immensely."
Among the new extension architecture for Version 3 of the product is VisualApplets Embedder, which Noffz said is the most interesting.
With VisualApplets Embedder, the FPGA image processing functionality from VisualApplets can now be embedded within imaging devices and cameras. VisualApplets Embedder makes VisualApplets compatible on any third party FPGA-based hardware.
"This makes an imaging device VisualApplets ready," he said. "One such product is the Baumer LX camera series with VisualApplets. However, Baumer is the first, but definitely not the last. The cameras were honored with thePlatinum Level Award at the Vision Systems Design 2016 Innovators Awards Program."
This product was developed as a result of market feedback, according to Faulkner. Many imaging device OEMs want to use FPGAs in their products, but the time-to-market aspect is critical, and VisualApplets Embedder dramatically improves the time-to-market in shortened development time and in a faster response to market demands, he noted.
In terms of possible applications or areas where the company or industry could see growth, Faulkner mentioned high-speed imaging, as well as embedded vision, which he sums up as "better, faster, smaller."
"We are seeing new uses of machine vision in embedded devices that were impossible just two years ago," he said. "The future projects will only become more radically interesting."
View more information on Silicon Software.
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