May 13, 1997, Robots & Vision Show, Detroit, MI – Today, the Matrox Imaging Products Group announced Matrox Genesis-LC, an advanced PCI frame grabber for OEMs and integrators involved in industrial, medical, and scientific imaging. This analog/digital capture board with integrated display interfaces to virtually any color or monochrome video device, and sells for thousands less than any other comparable product. A combination of custom Matrox ASICs and off-the-shelf chips, the Matrox Genesis-LC is able to simultaneously capture image data to display and transfer it to PC memory in real time. The newest member of the award-winning Matrox Genesis family, Matrox Genesis-LC meets the demands of developers who need a single slot solution for flexible video acquisition and display, but whose application prerequisites do not include on-board processing. A Matrox Genesis-LC and Matrox Imaging Library running on a host PC offer a powerful platform to build cost-effective, high-performance machine vision, medical imaging, and image analysis systems.

Matrox Genesis-LC retains all of the same acquisition and display functions that made the Matrox Genesis image processor the subsystem of choice for vision systems all over the world. Matrox Genesis-LC offers analog acquisition at up to 140 MHz, up to 32-bit digital at up to 30 MHz, and frame or line scan input at up to 64K pixels per line and 64K lines. As many as 4 channels can be acquired at once. The board is fully programmable to accept signals from a variety of devices such as the scanning electron microscopes (SEM) used in semiconductor applications, high-resolution cameras used in electronics inspection, asynchronous reset cameras used in industrial inspection, and medical scanners used in X-Ray, MRI, CT, and ultrasound. Since it is extremely flexible, Matrox Genesis-LC accommodates changing acquisition requirements. When a developer updates a vision system in the future, Matrox Genesis-LC can easily be configured for an even higher resolution or faster rate camera.

The Matrox Genesis-LC design provides the real-time performance expected of today's leading edge vision hardware, delivering sustained capture to display and transfers to system memory at over 100 Mbytes per second for simultaneous visualization and processing of data. A custom ASIC (Matrox VIA) handles all data management tasks and also performs real-time, on-the-fly image reformatting and reconstruction of non-consecutive pixel data output from devices such as time multiplexed or multitap cameras.

The on-board, accelerated, high-resolution display with dual frame buffer architecture provides the non-destructive overlay capabilities needed to annotate medical images or mark fiducials and other regions of interest with cross hairs and boxes for part handling, alignment, and inspection tasks.

Since Matrox Genesis-LC is part of the Matrox Genesis family, a developer has a migration path to more performance should application demands increase. If, for example, an existing inspection system uses Matrox Genesis-LC and inspection rates increase past the point of host-based processing, a Matrox Genesis processor board can be used with the Matrox Genesis-LC. Or, should additional multiple camera inputs and additional processing resources be required for an existing system, a Matrox Genesis main board can be used in conjunction with a Matrox Genesis-LC.

Because interfacing vision hardware to non-standard devices can be difficult and time consuming, Matrox offers an intelligent camera configuration application called Matrox Intellicam. This Windows-based utility allows developers to interface to Matrox frame grabbers and image processors in a matter of minutes.

Software support also includes MIL-Lite, a subset of the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) of 'C' routines for application development. MIL-Lite is used for image acquisition, display and transfer control. The complete version of MIL, available separately, is a comprehensive imaging library with commands for image processing, blob analysis, pattern matching, gauging/measurement, and OCR. MIL/MIL-Lite environment support for Matrox Genesis-LC includes Windows NT and extended DOS.

Another development tool is Matrox Inspector, Windows-based imaging software that provides interactive access to hundreds of MIL operations for quickly testing and validating vision algorithms as well as analysis and measurement of images (see enclosed news release).

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