From plug-and-play to high performance

Brian Doody COO Dalsa Waterloo, ON, Canada Brian Doody became COO* of Dalsa in 2006, with responsibility for overseeing all of the company’s internal operations, including both the Digital Imaging and Semiconductor businesses. He joined the company in 1985 and has since served in multiple roles, including VP of manufacturing and engineering and VP of operations, as well as president of Dalsa Digital Imaging, where he was responsible for the firm’s $100 million digital imaging business. A professional engineer, Doody has a BSEE from Queen’s University and an MS from the University of Waterloo. In an exclusive interview with T&MW, Doody discussed the challenges facing manufacturers of vision systems. Brian Doody comments on plug-and-play systems, product-development approaches, market opportunities, and other topics in the continuation of this interview.

A:One major challenge is ease of use. Customers need to get up and running on our products as fast as possible. A second consideration is price versus performance. Dalsa has traditionally focused on high-performance solutions, but we need to balance that with cost considerations. Finally, customers demand high-quality service, whether they are technicians on the factory floor or design engineers working on OEM systems.

Q: How do your recent new products address these concerns?

A: The new Genie Series for Gigabit Ethernet are area-array-based cameras that eliminate the frame grabber. That's a big advantage, of course, in ease of setup, since all you do is plug the camera into an existing network port. Our new line-scan series of cameras, called Spyder GigE, provides similar advantages, and both lines of cameras automatically start up the appropriate drivers when plugged in. So, it's really a shrink-wrapped, plug-and-play solution.

Among other new products, the Sapera Essential Software toolkit bundles board-level acquisition and control with advanced image processing—and also offers a new geometric search tool. For the high-end performance, such as mask and wafer inspection, we offer the X-64 frame grabber that delivers the processing power and image acquisition speed that are critical in those billion-dollar fabs.

Q: Which vision applications are growing the fastest?

A: We see a great deal of interest in the area of identification. This field requires the addition of very advanced pattern-recognition algorithms. Applications are very broad, ranging from security and surveillance to automated microscopic identification of defective cells in medical diagnostics. We also look for growing end markets where vision is becoming more dominant and more critical. A good example is flat-panel displays. To get costs down, manufacturers have been increasing the size of substrates to get more screens out of the process. This requires the addition of higher-resolution automated inspection, and that creates more opportunities for our products.

Q: Which video-acquisition standard seems to be winning out today, Camera Link or Gigabit Ethernet?

A: It's a little early to declare a winner. GigE is still a new technology, compared to Camera Link. Each really represents different markets and applications.

Gigabit Ethernet really targets applications where ease of use and cost reduction are big considerations. For example, customers can eliminate frame grabbers. On the other hand, GigE is limited by data transfer rates, about 100 Mbytes/s, and that assumes that you have complete control of the Ethernet and have no other data running on it.

But many of the applications that we serve in the high-performance market operate at much higher data transfer rates. Here, we rely on Camera Link, which not only can be readily expanded, but also offers constant access to, and control of, the data path in both directions.

Still, for lower speeds—for example, 60-frames/s VGA—GigE will become a dominant player. I compare GigE to the RS-170 analog standard that was used everywhere in the first applications of machine vision back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gigabit Ethernet will be the solution that replaces that analog standard.