International vision show highlights technology, markets
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 11/7/2006 11:12:00 AM
Stuttgart, Germany. Highlighting machine-vision markets, FPGA programming techniques, and a new home for future Stuttgart vision fairs, Vision 2006 press-conference speakers today painted an encouraging picture of the machine-vision industry throughout Europe as well as the rest of the world.
In opening comments, Ulrich Kromer, managing director of Messe Stuttgart, said that the number of exhibitors at this year’s event for the first time surpassed 200, reaching 215, up from about 200 in 2005. In square meters, the show’s exhibit space was up 4% from 2005 to reach a total of 13,500 square meters—straining the existing infrastructure support capabilities. The strain will be alleviated next year, he said, when Vision 2006 occupies new facilities now under construction near the Stuttgart airport.
Kromer noted that Vision 2006 is truly an international event, with 42% of exhibitors (up from 15% in 1998) and 20% (of a total of 5000) of visitors coming from abroad, with 22 countries represented. Kromer said that from a product-category perspective, about two thirds of exhibitors identify themselves as component manufacturers while less than one-third identify themselves as system manufacturers.
Dr. Dietmar Ley, chairman of the VDMA (http://www.vdma.org) Machine Vision Group and CEO of Basler (http://www.basler-vc.com), commented on machine-vision markets, noting that German producers in 2005 for the first time gained more than half (55%) of their revenues from exports. German firms’ North American revenues, he said, were up 42%, more than offsetting decreases of 5% in domestic revenues and 4% in revenues from Asia. Total revenues for European suppliers mirrored German firms’ North American sales, increasing 43%, while their sales within Europe grew 6%, and their sales to Asia dropped 4%.
Ley broke down revenue figures for German and all European firms according to product groups. For German companies, sales of configurable systems grew 45% from 2004 to 2005, while sales of application-specific systems fell 3%. For all European companies, the figures were +39% and +2%, respectively. Customer sectors served by system manufacturers, he said, include automotive (30% of sales), glass (13%), printing (10%), electronics (9%), rubber and plastic (5%), and semiconductors (4%), with non-manufacturing applications achieving 16% of the market.
Ley cited key features that he said will be important to machine-vision-product success: simple operation, compact sizes, increased efficiency, and standard interfaces.
Dr. Klaus-Henning Noffz, managing director of Silicon Software (http://www.silicon-software.de/), concluded the Vision 2006 press-conference event by describing his company’s VisualApplets programming tools, which garnered his company a Vision 2006 award at a ceremony held this evening.
VisiualApplets, he said, are graphic tools through which FPGAs can be self-programmed without any hardware-specific knowledge on the part of machine-vision programmers. The focal point of VisualApplets, he said, is algorithmic implementation of a project using a graphic dataflow model, which in turn gets translated automatically into a hardware-related pipeline model, enabling machine-vision applications engineers to act as software developers—not hardware developers. The use of FPGAs, he said, is to eliminate the processing and power-consumption limitations of standard microprocessors.
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