BitFlow Camera Link Frame Grabbers

BitFlow's Camera Link frame grabbers are made up of two different families, the Karbon-CL and R3-CL.

The Karbon-CL is the world's first four-camera PCI Express frame grabber and was designed with two main applications in mind. First, in situations where more than one camera is needed, the Karbon-CL can reduce both the system cost and the hardware footprint by its ability to acquire from up to four cameras. Second, in situations where extremely high data rates and/or frame rates are required, the Karbon-CL has been designed to acquire up to 128 bits at 85 MHz pixel clock rate and DMA at data rates up to 2.0 GB/S. It can simultaneously acquire from up to four Base CL cameras or two Full CL cameras. It is built on top of BitFlow's FlowThru technology, which provides zero latency access to data, super low CPU usage, and unlimited DMA destination size. The Karbon-CL is the first member of BitFlow's Karbon family, a platform that hosts a wide variety of virtual frame grabbers. These virtual frame grabbers can be customized to meet your specific needs.

The R3 frame grabber family was designed to simplify the task of interfacing today's Camera Link cameras to a wide array of imaging applications. The R3-CL can acquire from almost every Base CL camera manufactured. Combining the power of a proven, sophisticated acquisition/DMA engine with a flexible camera interface and control architecture, the R3-CL is BitFlow's most affordable Camera Link interface and is an excellent choice for end-users, system integrators and OEMs. The R3-CL is the second generation of BitFlow frame grabbers that uses their FlowThru technology. The principle here is to do away with the frame buffer that traditional frame grabbers are built around, and instead optimize the data path so that the images flow through the board and into the host's memory with no latency and zero CPU usage. The only on-board storage is a FIFO to handle the asynchronous nature of the PCI bus. Finally, the entire system is interrupt based, so modern, multi-threaded, applications need not waste processing resources on controlling acquisition.