Faster. Everyone, it seems, is always looking for ways to make things go faster. Cars, e-mails, decisions – time is such a precious commodity that we often spend months and years looking for ways to save minutes and seconds. But as a rule, going faster doesn’t help if you sacrifice quality in order to get there. A message can be confusing if it arrives early but without all of its content, and a decision can be disastrous if made quickly but wrong.
Industrial inspection systems are no exception, as increasing the speed at which they operate leads directly to improvements in efficiency and productivity. But for a vision system, it often doesn’t help to increase speed (or frame rate) alone – what’s often needed is an increase in bandwidth without sacrificing image quality, so that images of the same – or higher – resolution can be captured at a faster rate.
ON Semiconductor recognized this in the design of our PYTHON family of CMOS Image Sensors, a family of nine devices that combine high quality imaging with high speed capture. The smallest member of this family, the VGA resolution PYTHON 300, captures images at up to 815 frames per second to enable very high speed in inspection applications. But the highest resolution member, the newly announced PYTHON 25k, images at “only” 80 frames per second – which actually represents 8 times more data than the VGA device. Said another way, the VGA part uses half of the bandwidth available from a single USB 3.0 connection (2.5 Gb/sec), while the PYTHON 25k requires the equivalent of two USB 3.1 or two 10GigE connections (over 20 Gb/sec) to support its full operation.
In addition, we based the PYTHON family on a scalable platform that allows camera manufacturers to leverage a single camera design to support multiple devices, helping to simplify supply logistics and speed time to market for new camera designs – which also helps make things faster.
Because sometimes, being able to go faster is what really matters.