FPGA - No hardware programming knowledge needed

For Machine Vision and Imaging applications
The growing demand for improvements in automation and quality inspection requires advanced, more flexible and higher-performance solutions. Silicon Software has responded to this demand by offering a range of imaging tools and FPGA frame grabbers. Additionally, their easy-to-use Applet development software has made Silicon Software a recognised leader in accelerated imaging.

Silicon Software has designed and produced intelligent image processing boards since the 1990s. Their success has been built on their ability to provide a platform that allows for easy programming through the use of their software Applets without the need to understand complex FPGA functionality.

Using highly-parallelized data processing with high bandwidths, their products target the industrial imaging market. They allow complex and high speed visual inspections to be developed and implemented in real time very easily and with little prior knowledge using their VisualApplets GUI to programme their FPGA grabbers.

The benefits of using FPGAs and VisualApplets
• Real time high speed solutions. FPGA use in machine vision results in enormous CPU load reduction. As a consequence of the ever increasing bandwidths from modern camera sensors, CPUs and even GPUs are sometimes unable to cope with the large amounts of data and to interprate in real time. Silicon software provides solutions to do so with ease.

• No FPGA hardware programming knowledge is required. FPGA programming can be done by imaging software programmers or qualified machine vision engineers - FPGA hardware programmers are NOT required. The graphical, high-level approach provided by VisualApplets makes the task quite straight forward.

• Flexible and adaptable. FPGA applications created with VisualApplets with the Silicon Software FPGA grabbers can be implemented into almost any image processing system.

• Accelerated time to market due to decreased development time.

What Silicon Software offers

1

Frame Grabbers
Two series of frame grabbers are offered that cover different requirements. Both series support a variety of interfaces - Camera Link; Camera Link HS; CoaXPress; GigE Vision; LVDS and Thunderbolt Technology and are supplied as plug-in cards for a PC or as external devices.

Frame grabbers as image acquisition devices (A series), providing additional pre-processing functions alongside image acquisition
Series A grabbers have powerful FPGA processors to integrate high-quality image pre-processing functions into the firmware without having to load into the CPU for processing. There is no image loss and minimal latency.

Frame grabbers as image processing devices (V series) which are programmable for individualisation
Series V can be visually programmed (using VisualApplets), offering more FPGA resources and larger memory expansion for carrying out complex image processing. As with Series A, there is no need to load into the CPU for processing. Series V have use of the comparable A series models’ image acquisition functions but also have additional functions (hardware interfaces).

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Award-winning VisualApplets software enables graphic programming of FPGA vision processors using flowcharts which allows hardware and software programmers to implement demanding and time-sensitive applications on FPGA hardware within minutes. VisualApplet offers:

New flexibility

Fast and easy development - image processing tasks are implemented quickly and comfortably

Existing solutions are maintained and refined in a time-and-cost-effective manner

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The Embedded VisualApplet framework provides an easy-to-use method for introducing VisualApplet to third party hardware platforms such as cameras. The framework allows the user setting up an integration of the VisualApplet system for creating image processing pipelines into their own FPGA design.