During day two of the VISION 2021 machine vision trade fair in Stuttgart, Germany, Dr. Sabine Ott from Excelitas PCO GmbH described the latest updates — including a major speed upgrade — to the Camera Link HS (CLHS) vision standard as part of Industrial VISION Days.
During the presentation, Ott detailed the forthcoming speed upgrade to CLHS, made possible through CLHS IP core architecture, which is available from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) for $1,000. Through its X Protocol, CLHS stands ready to move to speeds of 25 Gbps on an FPGA by using 25 Gbps transceivers over fiber with SFP28, QSFP28, or MPO connectors.
“By implementing general IP cores into CLHS, the standard was built for future upgrades, including this move to 25 Gbps without the need for modifications,” said Bob McCurrach, A3’s director of vision and imaging standards.
The CLHS X Protocol IP core also supports F2 (SFP+) fiber connections and will soon support F3 — QSFP+ (quad small-form-factor pluggable) and MPO (multifiber push-on) — connectors at rates of up to 16 Gbps per. Additionally, the forthcoming specification revision will validate CLHS as having up to 100 Gbps (4 x 25 Gbps) available bandwidth using a single MPO connector.
“Since CLHS was first introduced in 2012, the 64b/66b encoded X Protocol has been in production and has a long history of field-tested stability,” said McCurrach.
Furthermore, the presentation touched on the road map to 50 Gbps and what that process involves.
