Allied Vision - Alvium CSI-2

The Allied Vision Alvium series offers a wide range of sensors for the visible, near-infrared, SWIR and UV spectrum. Designed to meet a wide variety of requirements, it encapsulates the high performance of the latest CMOS sensors from leading manufacturers such as Sony or ON Semiconductor. The portfolio ranges from VGA up to 24 Megapixel resolutions.

Working with established host interface standards, the Alvium series ensures easy integration. Options include MIPI CSI-2, USB 3.1 (according to USB3 Vision standard) and Gigabit Ethernet (according to GigE Vision standard). External components (such as triggers or lens control) can easily be connected by using the general purpose I/O pins (GPIO) provided by the design.

The low weight is just one of the benefits to the ultra compact single board design. The unique system-on-chip (SoC), designed by Allied Vision, completely reinvents the machine vision camera. It overcomes a lot of the problems associated with FPGA-based machine vision cameras, including how bulky they are. The high performance embedded system packs a lot of features into a very small system.

The Allied Vision Alvium camera line provides a lot of housing options, from a bare board right the way through to a completely enclosed camera. The orientation of connectors can be selected as well. Options include bare board, open front and full housing. With the USB camera, depending on the application's constraints, back or side connectors are available.

The high power consumption problems associated with FPGA-based cameras are not a problem with the Allied Vision Alvium series. The proprietary chip technology ensures the system only consumes as much power as it needs. If an application only requires a finite set of functionalities, that's all it will draw the power for. Furthermore, each series of the Allied Vision Alvium has been designed with a pre-selected set of functions, tailored to the market segment, ensuring maximum efficiency with very effective power management. Therefore models with basic feature sets (designed for specific functions) will consume considerably less power than advanced models.

The Allied Vision Alvium camera range has the capacity to encompass a lot of preprocessing. Each series has a tailored group of performance, image quality and system level feature sets customised to meet most of the target market's requirements.