At a conference in Mannheim, Germany, in May, Rex Lee, Ph.D., president of Pyramid Imaging, Inc., was awarded the certificate that recognizes the company becoming the VisualApplets Competence Center (VACC) for the U.S. This designation enables Pyramid to consult with and provide support for users of Silicon Software’s VisualApplets software for the graphical programming of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) vision processors.
Based in Mannheim, Germany, Silicon Software produces off-the-shelf products and customer-specific original equipment manufacturer solutions with its hardware and software developments for machine vision and quality inspection in automation. The company focuses on the intelligent image processing boards of the microEnable product series and the VisualApplets software.
Pyramid is more than excited to share this technology with customers in the U.S., many of whom are unaware that it even exists.
“Silicon Software’s technology is very unique and revolutionary. Their technology allows programming Xilinx FPGAs without knowledge of any FPGA hardware description language (HDL),” says Lee. “Thus, nonexperts can have Xilinx FPGAs programmed for real-time image processing in days rather than in months using traditional HDL programming.”
VisualApplets allows for rapid development of embedded vision applications — currently a hot topic in the machine vision industry. Any application requiring high-bandwidth solutions or low size, weight, and power (SWAP) solutions will benefit due to the elimination of frame grabbers (once the FPGA is in the camera) or by greatly reducing existing CPU requirements, given that most of the image processing can be done on the FPGA in the grabber.
Pyramid Imaging was one of 28 companies internationally to earn VACC certification, which is valid for two years.
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