MÜNSTER, Germany – XIMEA, a developer of integrated machine vision systems, has announced that it will support the recently launched Thunderbolt interface. Developed by Intel and brought to market by Apple Inc., this technology connects peripheral devices to a computer by way of an expansion bus. It was introduced on Feb. 24, 2011, on Apple’s MacBook Pro and is now available on the iMac and on some RAID systems. Several computer and PC peripheral vendors have announced support for Thunderbolt for their notebooks and their storage, network and professional camera devices.
Thunderbolt essentially combines Display Port and PCIExpress into a new serial data interface, yielding unprecedented dual bidirectional 10 Gb/s channels over a thin copper cable. The architecture used – with active cables incorporating repeaters/equalizers on both ends – facilitates transmission media with exact compensation of wire attenuation, and thus preserves the required signal integrity.
XIMEA’s customers could benefit from the enhanced performance without incurring any additional cost due to the integration effort. All of the company’s products set to have a Thunderbolt interface – whether the CURRERA, a set of smart cameras with an onboard PC, other cameras offered, or emerging products – natively support several leading IP libraries. These include Cognex VisionPro, MVTec Halcon, National Instruments LabVIEW, STEMMER Common Vision Blox and others, with the list of supported libraries increasing almost weekly.
“We are excited to support this very innovative technology, which will benefit our customers in myriad ways,” said Max Larin, CEO at XIMEA. “Thunderbolt is more convenient than USB, offers performance exceeding that of Camera Link or 10GigE, and requires only the power budget of CoaXPress – all of this at the moderate price of GigE and Firewire.
“Thunderbolt has all the features to become the major standard interface in industrial automation in general, and in machine vision in particular. Depending on Intel’s commercialization strategies, we feel it has a strong chance of superseding 1394A/B, USB and CameraLink and, with the upcoming optical upgrade, surpassing the CameraLink HS, CoaXPress and CameraLink 2 as well.”
At the invitation of the EMVA, XIMEA recently commented on Thunderbolt for the INSPECT Buyers Guide 2012, the official buyers guide of the EMVA.
ABOUT XIMEA
Drawing on two decades of experience in the industry, XIMEA offers state-of-the-art machine vision and imaging technologies for a broad range of applications. The breakthrough CURRERA is a complete vision system incorporating advanced camera technology and an on-board PC running embedded versions of Windows and Linux and supporting most of the leading image processing libraries.
Leveraging the expertise and extensive R&D efforts of industry veteran SOFTHARD, CURRERA brings significant computational power and remarkable convenience to the front end of imaging systems. Starter kits, breakout boxes and other accessories simplify system integration. In addition, the company offers one-stop support for camera, PC and image processing libraries integration.
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