PCVisionPlus Coreco Imaging High Performance Analog Frame Grabber

The Dalsa / Imaging Technology PCVisionPlus High Performance Analog Frame Grabber is a high speed image capture for fast analog, progressive scan and variable scan cameras which digitizes monochrome analog video to 8 or 12 bits, at sample frequencies up to 53 MHz. The PCVisionplus supports broadcast standard timing (RS170, CCIR), progressive scan and non-standard (variable scan) timing as well as two monochrome cameras.

The high data transfer rate of the PCI-bus eliminates the need for on-board processing or display circuitry, so image display and processing is handled by the host computer resources. The linear format image memory allows acquisition of a variety of image sizes. The image memory behaves as a temporary buffer between the camera interface and the host PCI-bus system. The PCVisionplus incorporates a hardware "scatter gather" table for highly efficient, fully automated image transfers from the image memory. This frees the host CPU to perform processing during bus master transfers rather than controlling the transfer operation. In addition to the Hardware Scatter Gather function, the bus master controller has multiple frame ping-pong source and destination capabilities which allow the application to program the PCVisionplus to establish the needed amount of processing time.

The PCVisionplus is capable of bus mastering image data directly to a destination memory within the PCI-bus system, such as system memory or VGA memory. Transfer rates up to the theoretical 133MB/s can be sustained, depending upon the host capabilities. Images can be transferred to host memory in a fraction of the time that they were acquired. By minimizing the PCI-bus transfer time and CPU overhead, more bandwidth is available for processing or other system resources.