EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS-Adimec, a world leader in application-specific, leading-edge industrial camera solutions, is the first supplier to offer production-ready cameras for use with the recently-ratified CoaXPress interface standard. The company joins several other suppliers of machine vision and imaging equipment in offering solutions for the high-speed, long transmission length capabilities of the new standard.

The CoaXPress standard has been hosted by The Japan Industrial Imaging Association (JIIA), and Version 1.0 of its specification received overwhelming approval by the initiative’s Working Group and Liaison Group at ITE 2010 in Yokohama, Japan.

“We are pleased to see the continued momentum behind CoaXPress, including the rapid emergence of commercial products based on the standard. As a camera supplier with a strategy of offering market-driven solutions, it is important that a strong ecosystem of support is available for CoaXPress as the specification is ratified and accepted by the major industry organizations,” said Joost van Kuijk, vice president marketing and technology, Adimec. “Our OPAL series of cameras is the industry’s first to offer support for CoaXPress, giving system developers more options for high-speed, long-length implementations of machine vision products. Our support for CoaXPress underscores our commitment to deliver flexible solutions for a wide variety of system requirements, from performance to cost to connectivity needs in any kind of environment.”

CoaXPress is a digital interface specification that allows the transmission of high speed data from a device, for example a camera, to a host such as a frame grabber in a PC, at a high speed of up to 6.25Gbps over a single coax cable. The device need not be a single camera-it could, for example, be an interface device that concatenates data from several cameras-since CoaXPress has the ability to carry many channels of image data and meta-data. For communication from host to device, there is a 20Mbps “uplink” that allows for control and configuration data. For even higher speeds, links may be concatenated to provide multiples of the single coax bandwidth. Finally, there is also power provided over the cable at 24 volts, up to 13 watts per cable.

In addition to the simplicity and availability benefits of using coax, CoaXPress works over relatively long cable lengths, depending on the precise cable type-up to 40 meters at 6.25Gbps and much further at lower speeds.