Aug. 23, 2024 - In response to the machine vision industry's enthusiastic adoption of CoaXPress 2.0 (CXP-12), BitFlow has expanded its Claxon frame grabber suite to include five CXP-12 models supporting single, dual, quad and fiber CoaXPress camera systems. Approved in 2011, CXP-12 today is the de-facto standard for high-bandwidth vision applications, having doubled the previous standard's maximum data rate to an unprecedented 12.5 Gbps per link.
Link aggregation enables CXP-12 data rates to reach 50 Gbps, or five times the speed of 10 GigE Vision. Further boosting speed, the CoaXPress 2.0 working group later amended the standard by adding CoaXPress-over-Fiber (CoF), an innovation that lets the CXP protocol be run unmodified over Ethernet connections rather than coaxial cables. BitFlow Claxon CXP-12 frame grabbers feature a low-profile, half-size x8 PCIe design tailored to fit slots in standard PCs or laptops, while some boards can be integrated directly into NVIDIA and Advantech GPUs.
Other industry-required features include low speed uplink of 41.6 Mbps, 13W per link of Power Over CoaXPress, and full GenICam support. While the Claxon Fiber does not support power transfer over fiber optic cable, it accommodates long distance connectivity and is immune to electrical noise. The five Claxon models currently available from BitFlow are:
- Claxon CXP1: Supports one single-link CXP-12 camera to 12.5 Gbps.
- Claxon CXP2: Supports simultaneous capture from two single-link CXP-12 cameras to 12.5 Gbps or a single dual-link CXP-12 camera to 25 Gbps.
- Claxon CXP4: Supports simultaneous capture from four single-link CXP-12 cameras to 12.5 Gbps, two dual-link CXP-12 cameras to 25 Gbps, or a single quad-link CXP-12 camera to 50 Gbps.
- Claxon CXP4-V: Identical to the CXP4 but featuring ventilation, It is designed for use with small form factor fanless computers where airflow isn’t sufficient to dissipate FPGA heat.
- Claxon Fiber: Supports QFSP+ compatible fiber cable assemblies connected to one quad-link, two dual-link, or four single-link CoF cameras at lengths over a mile.
Adding a Claxon CXP frame grabber to an application is simple with the BitFlow SDK, which supports both Windows and Linux. Applications can be developed using C/C++/C# or Python and BitFlow's sophisticated buffer management APIs. In addition, free drivers can be downloaded from BitFlow for most 3rd-party machine vision software packages.
