Pleora Technologies Q&A: Evolution of Ethernet technology, future industry growth areas

During The Vision Show 2016, I sat down with John Phillips, Senior Manager, Product Management, and discussed a number of topics related to the latest trends and topics in machine vision and imaging.

Pleora Technologies recently became the first company from the machine vision industry to join the NBASE-T Alliance, a consortium collaborating on new technologies that extend the bandwidth capabilities of CAT5e twisted-pair copper cabling using standard Ethernet technology. The NBASE-T specification governed by the alliance defines a new type of Ethernet signaling that boosts the speed of CAT5e twisted-pair cabling well beyond its designed limit of 1 Gbps to support 2.5 and 5 Gbps speeds – or if network infrastructure supports it 10 Gbps over Cat6 cabling – for distances up to 100 meters.

The specification was initially developed to help wireless access points cope with increasing data requirements, but the technology is a natural evolution for high-performance imaging, suggested Pleora. When asked about this, Phillips explained why this is important for imaging applications.

"NBASE-T technology offers a natural evolution for high-performance imaging thanks to its bandwidth support, low-cost cabling, and compatibility with the GigE Vision standard," he said. "GigE Vision has been widely adopted in imaging, in part thanks to the cost advantages of off-the-shelf cabling and widely available networking components. On hurdle has been bandwidth, particularly with the latest generation of sensors. With NBASE-T, you can have up to five times the speed of GigE with the same cabling."

He continued, "Beyond the obvious performance benefits, NBASE-T will bring new cost advantages to imaging system design. The standard is backed by large players from the telecomm industry, such as Cisco and Intel, and NBASE-T technology is now being deployed in a broadening range of applications. This will help driver wide availability of lower cost, highly reliability system level and component products."

Another topic we touched on during our discussion was potential growth areas in the industry for NBASE-T, with Phillips discussing a number of applications, including high-speed web inspection.

"We see many Camera Link-based high-speed web inspection applications moving to NBASE-T."

Other areas he identified included medical imaging, such as high-speed X-ray, as well as GPU-based image processing.

"GPUs are incredibly powerful and the industry hasn’t explored these to the full potential," he said. "As GPUs get cheaper and easier to program, they will become easier to use. They are already prevalent in machine learning applications."

In terms of Pleora’s own future, he identified high-speed wireless as one potential new product that could be on the horizon.

"We’ve developed 802.11n wireless device that serves a wide range of applications, but is bandwidth limited," he said. "802.11ad is very exciting because it will enable speeds above 1 Gbps. Because we run GigE Vision over wireless link, the software and image processing can be agnostic."

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