This project was conceived while working on one of our other camera projects. That camera utilized a multi-port CameraLink interface to a host resident frame grabber card. The customer for the camera desired to have a different interface to the camera. The requirements were to achieve the same throughput as the original CameraLink interfaces, but utilize a 10G Ethernet interface over fiber-optic cable.

All of the benefits of using 10G Ethernet were thus realized. Benefits such as being able to run over longer distances over a physically thin and robust interface cable. Standard Ethernet protocols were used thus allowing the use of standard network interface cards, the ability to work through standard switches and routers, and standardization of data interfaces at the application level.

The solution we came up with is pictured above. It is a bridge card that took in two, full or medium format, CameraLink ports and put out a single 10G Ethernet interface to the host computer. The system was designed to be a self contained circuit card assembly with its own power supply circuitry, status and monitoring functions, and on-board image processing based upon a programmable FPGA based architecture. We included two banks of high speed DDR2 memory to allow for frame buffering capability as well as storage of temporary image data results during image processing. Total memory bandwidth exceeded 10 GB/sec.

The local image processing functions were able to keep up with line speed image transfers over the 10G Ethernet port and were used to offload the processing burden of the host computer. Total pixel rate of the bridge card approached 500MPixels/sec.