Xilinx Korea (General Manager Ahn Hung-sik) November 26, 2013 – Xilinx announced that it has increased design productivity for machine vision applications by establishing an end-to-end Smarter Vision development environment for the Zynq®-7000 All Programmable SoC using the HALCON and VisualApplets development platforms. MVTec's HALCON software for machine vision provides comprehensive high-performance support for video analysis and runs on multicore platforms such as the Zynq All Programmable SoC. HALCON includes a library comprising over 1,800 operators for blob analysis, shape, matching, measurement, identification, and 3D vision. Silicon Software's VisualApplets provides an advanced image processing library, high-level design entry, and simulation tools that enable users to program FPGA hardware quickly and efficiently for industrial image processing. The strength of the collaboration between Xilinx, HALCON, and VisualApplets is that it creates an end-to-end Smarter Vision development environment for Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC users, reducing design cycles and time-to-market.

The Zynq-7000 SoC, whose hardware and software are both reprogrammable, is well-suited for the system flexibility and customization required by machine vision applications. The dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ processing system inherent to the Zynq-7000 architecture provides a software programming platform to run application software and handle networking and management tasks, while Xilinx® 28-nanometer programmable logic provides hardware programming capable of delivering real-time performance in image processing, filtering, and scaling. By placing key image processing functions within the FPGA fabric, performance is accelerated significantly faster than traditional software-based approaches.

Christoph Fritsch, Director of Industrial, Scientific, and Medical Markets at Xilinx, stated, "In the past, machine vision operated through cameras transmitting video and images and the central processing unit of a PC. However, with the development of embedded technology, smart vision cameras and compact vision systems have advanced to the point where they can support distributed intelligence at node locations." He added, "The growth of smart vision applications requires All Programmable embedded processing technology that can provide real-time processing capabilities and system flexibility for customization."

Klaus-Henning Noffz, CEO of Silicon Software, said, "The Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC's inherent ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor is best suited for advanced image processing applications." He added, "VisualApplets provides a development platform that maximizes this processing capability by offering short design cycles, simple verification, auto-generated interfaces for ARM, and an extensive image processing library. Software and application engineers can now efficiently create complex designs with significantly reduced time-to-market and greatly reduced risk."

Dr. Gerhard Blahusch, Solutions Services Director at MVTec, stated, "Additional support for the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC is a natural extension of HALCON software's flexible architecture unique to machine vision." He added, "As the FPGA fabric provides the real-time performance required for pixel processing at high resolution and high frame rates, HALCON's automatic operator parallelization feature can maximize utilization of the ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor without additional programming."

Technical demonstrations utilizing Silicon Software's VisualApplets and MVTec's HALCON will be available at the Xilinx booth #6-111 at SPS Drives in Nuremberg, Germany from November 26 to 28.