MANNHEIM, GERMANY — Silicon Software GmbH, manufacturer of frame grabbers and intelligent image processing solutions, celebrates 20 years of business in 2017.

In September 1997, Dr. Klaus-Henning Noffz and Dr. Ralf Lay founded the company as a University of Mannheim spin-off. From the beginning, the two managing directors designed frame grabbers as versatile image acquisition boards combining FPGA technology and their programming expertise, to what later became known as VisualApplets, the graphical software environment for FPGA development. Creating intelligent solutions for complex applications in all industries with image processing in real-time, has been the motto of the company since its beginning.

Efficient image processing solutions have been the focus since the start to meet growing customer requirements for high data throughput, low latencies, long distances and a substantial unburdening of the host PC resources. Thus, powerful image pre-processing as well as signal processing functions and peripheral controls have been integrated in the early stages of the frame grabber series, this to support the very important high-speed camera interfaces. From those early days FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Array) become an economical processor alternative for small and medium-sized businesses. With the maturing of Intel’s Thunderbolt™ interface technology, an additionally created external FPGA-based frame grabber series allows image processing in very difficult environments such as manufacturing. The frame grabber market segment has recorded high growth rates during the last 20 years.

For more information, visit https://silicon.software/.