RVSI Extends Its Machine Vision Products Family
24 February 1999
RVSI Extends Its Machine Vision Products Family to the OEM Electronics Industry
CANTON, Mass.--Feb. 24, 1999--vision-based alignment and inspection needs of
electronics manufacturers
Robotic Vision Systems Inc. (RVSI; NASDAQ:ROBV) today unveiled two new, low-cost machine vision solutions addressing the needs of electronics manufacturers using surface-mount assembly equipment. The new Acuity 1300 and 1400 Vision Accelerator PCI boards, together with RVSI's Visionscape Fiducial & Component Libraries, provide the electronics industry with a new price-performance standard for vision-based alignment and inspection. The high speed, flexibility, and ease of integration inherent in these products provides the performance necessary to meet today's demanding vision requirements.
"The Acuity 1300 and 1400 vision accelerators go right to the heart of the needs of manufacturers of screen printers, liquid dispensing systems, and component placement equipment," said Ed Caracappa, Visionscape product manager at RVSI's Acuity CiMatrix Division. "Until now, the electronics industry has had to trade off performance for price. From now on, manufacturers can have both."
Custom ASIC accelerates vision
RVSI's Acuity 1000 family of vision accelerators are configured as half-size PCI-bus boards and feature a custom ASIC; high-speed image memory; and dedicated trigger inputs, strobe outputs and user-programmable digital I/O. Support for a variety of machine vision cameras is provided through interchangeable plug-in video front-end daughter cards. The Acuity 1300 supports up to four analog cameras, while the Acuity 1400 supports digital cameras.
"What sets our hardware apart from other machine vision providers and provides us a technological leg up is our ASIC," Mr. Caracappa said. "It performs bulk image data reduction, freeing the host CPU for high-level vision processing. This accelerates vision processing up to an order of magnitude faster than current-generation systems or CPU-only-based products."
In the Acuity 1000 family of intelligent frame grabbers, images are acquired on the on-board memory without any host PC CPU or bus loading. This architecture substantially reduces both the host CPU usage and the data bandwidth needs on the host PCI bus.
Software libraries aid development
OEMs who adopt the Acuity 1300 or 1400 have access to RVSI's Visionscape C++ libraries for easy development and integration into new or existing applications running under Windows NT. These libraries are optimized for accuracy, robustness, and speed. They include a large collection of image preprocessing and analysis capabilities as well as support for image acquisition, display overlay graphics, and camera calibration.
"Software also sets our products apart from the competition," Mr. Caracappa said. "Our libraries are extensively optimized for accuracy, robustness, and speed; and include a large collection of image pre-processing and image analysis capabilities. Users will also find support for image acquisition, display, overlay graphics, and camera calibration."
Higher level processing options specific to the electronics industry include libraries for subpixel alignment, fiducial finding, and component location and inspection. The component library includes a variety of pre-programmed types of common surface-mount components and can be readily extended to include new parts or custom processing through a flexible graphic-user interface.
About RVSI
Robotic Vision Systems, Inc. (RVSI) sets the standard for machine vision and electro-optical markets. Using leading-edge technology, RVSI joins vision-enabled process equipment, high-performance optics, lighting, and advanced hardware and software to assure product quality, identify and track parts, control manufacturing processes, and ultimately enhance profits for companies worldwide. Currently serving the semiconductor, electronics, automotive, pharmaceutical and packaging industries, RVSI has the most comprehensive line of machine vision systems available today. Headquartered in Canton, Mass., with offices worldwide, RVSI holds more than 100 patents in a broad range of technologies. For more information visit www.rvsi.com or call (800) 646-6664.
Visionscape and Data Matrix are trademarks of RVSI. All other referenced product names are trademarks of their respective companies