Matrox Imaging - News & Events - Press Releases Archives

Matrox announces a range of imaging solutions that support the QNX RTOS for mission-critical machine vision applications

July 27, 1998, Montreal, Canada - Matrox Imaging today announced QNX® real-time operating system (RTOS) support for several of its frame grabber boards, award-winning scalable vision processor and field-proven imaging library.

An industry leader in offering board-level vision hardware and software solutions for machine vision applications, Matrox is now providing customers with a range of hardware, and the extensive software support required for mission critical applications that need the fast hard real-time response times offered by the industry's leading RTOS for PCs.

"The decision to support the QNX RTOS was customer driven," said Pierantonio Boriero, product line manager for Matrox Imaging. "Customers were telling us that our hardware and software was what they wanted to use, but they needed to use our solutions in a deterministic environment."

Matrox is specifically supporting QNX 4.x for the Matrox Meteor-II digital frame grabber, the Matrox Genesis-LC frame grabber with on-board display and the award-winning Matrox Genesis scalable vision processor. To harness the power of this hardware, Matrox offers a 'C' library of high-level functions designed to drastically reduce the amount of code needed to create applications.

"OEMs and system integrators of machine vision and inspection systems can now use the QNX RTOS with a range of off-the-shelf PC vision hardware," said Greg Bergsma, senior technology analyst at QNX Software Systems Ltd. "What's more, they have the assurance of a software solution that combines Matrox's field-proven tools with QNX's fault-tolerant, MMU-protected operating environment."

With itsinstantaneous response times (1.95 usec per context switch on a Pentium 133) and fully distributed processing, the QNX RTOS is a popular choice for high-speed visual inspection systems in the manufacturing sector, as well as for network-distributed medical imaging applications. Based on a robust microkernel architecture, QNX scales seamlessly from tiny, ROM-based inspection devices to multi-processor systems for high-end image analysis.

About Matrox

Established in 1976, Matrox is a privately owned Canadian company based in Dorval, Quebec. Matrox Imaging designs, manufactures, markets and sells high-performance, PC-based vision/imaging hardware and software. Customers include OEMs, system integrators and professional users who build or retrofit machine vision, medical imaging, and image analysis systems. Products range from standard PCI frame grabbers to real-time, scalable, PCI vision processors; and application development software.

About QNX Software Systems

Founded in 1980, QSSL is the industry leader in high-performance realtime operating system software for the x86 platform. No other RTOS vendor has over 17 years' experience on x86, offers more options for x86, or has as large a marketshare on x86. Recently, QSSL added MIPS and PowerPC to its supported processor platforms.

QNX is a registered trademark of QNX Software Systems Ltd.

For more information, contact our Media Relations Team.