My fourth and finalofficial meeting of the first day of the VISION show was with Marc Damhaut, CEO, and Jean-Marie Jolet, Senior Field Application Engineer, at Euresys.
For this interview, I continued with the trend of opening up with questions on the state of the global machine vision industry. When asked to provide a general outlook on the industry, Jolet seemed optimistic.
"The availability of new technologies opens the door to new applications," he said.
At Euresys, products are developed both as a result of customer requests and the company’s own mission to advance existing technologies. For example, the Coaxlink Quad G3 frame grabber, which features four CXP-6 connections, and a PCIe 3.0 (Gen 3) 4-lane bus (3.9 GByte/s), targets applications requiring high data rates, including printed circuit board inspection, flat panel display inspection, glass inspection, web inspection, and so on, suggested Jolet. (The Quad G3 frame grabber can be seen here in a demonstration using an e2v line scan camera at VISION 2014).
When it came to identifying opportunity areas, Damhaut suggested that medical imaging is one area where the company could see growth in the coming years. Euresys has already developed a product specifically for this market in the Picolo HD PCIe video capture cards, which are compatible with SDI, HDMI, DVI and analog video sources and capture HD color video signals from one HD camera in a PC environment.
Factory automation, Damhaut stated, is still the primary driver for the market, and represents the biggest potential for growth, particularly in Asia.
"We are working mostly with machine makers who use our products," he said. "Right now, our business is about 75% frame grabbers and 25% software, and our forecast is steadily increasing."
Curious to see what they thought, I brought up a recent Vision Systems Design poll in which readers indicated that GigE and USB 3.0 would be the most popular interfaces in two years’ time.
"For factory automation," said Damhaut, "GigE and USB3 are great. But CoaXPress targets higher speed and bandwidth and offers the best balance for bandwidth and cable length."
Defense applications, in which HD-SDI could be replaced with CoaXPress, represent a significant opportunity for the switch to coax, he added.
Damhaut concluded the interview by simply stating that Euresys wants to make frame grabbers that are easy to integrate into new and existing systems and that are compatible with hundreds of different cameras.
The next "From the show floor" article will be published within the next few business days.
View more information on Euresys.
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James Carroll
Former VSD Editor James Carroll joined the team 2013. Carroll covered machine vision and imaging from numerous angles, including application stories, industry news, market updates, and new products. In addition to writing and editing articles, Carroll managed the Innovators Awards program and webcasts.