The formation of the CoaXPress 2.0 standard is nearly completed and the final draft should be ready in the first quarter of next year such that the release candidate can be finalized during the spring international vision standards meeting, after which the formal voting period will start. The first certified products can then be expected approximately at the end of 2017.
Twice a year an International Vision Standards Meeting (IVSM) is organized where the Working Groups of the main vision standards CoaXPress, USB3 Vision, Camera Link, Camera Link HS and GigE Vision meet and jointly work on next versions of the standards. The IVSM meeting is supported by five large industry associations: AIA, EMVA, JIIA, VDMA and CMVU.
Adimec actively contributes to standardization and is always present during the IVSM. Although, we mostly contribute to the CoaXPress interface as we believe it has many advantages with respect to other interfaces, we are also active in the Camera Link and GenICam committees, and we are member of the GigE Vision Working Group. The most recent meeting has been taken place two weeks ago and now is thus a good time to give an update about developments within the CoaXPress community.
It is great to see that the attention for CoaXPress is only increasing. In total about 80 companies were present during the standards meeting and about 40 companies were interested in or contributed to the CoaXPress standard. The level of attention for the CoaXPress standard has almost doubled since last year’s meeting.
A hot topic for CoaXPress is the release of CoaXPress 2.0. This successor of CoaXPress 1.1.1 will extend the available data transfer rates with 10 Gbit/s and 12.5 Gbit/s per CoaXPress connection. The CoaXPress 1.1.1 data rates remain available such that CoaXPress 2.0 products can be backwards compatible. This increase in data rate is a significant improvement compared to the 6.25 Gbit/s that is currently the maximum data transfer rate supported. The increase allows for higher frame rates or larger camera resolutions moreover it also allows for the use of less, more flexible cables and/or less frame grabbers. These possibilities result in more flexibility in system design, and in a reduction of system costs.
On top of the increase in data transfer rate, other features to improve usability and reliability are added to the standard as well. For example, features like data striping, an increased uplink data rate and forward error correction will be added. For the longer term, i.e. for successors of the 2.0 version, the possibility to couple to optical interfaces will be prepared as well.
Furthermore with the increasing number of companies that are developing products with CoaXPress it is important to guarantee interoperability between manufacturers. Therefore, plans have been created to improve the available test routines to verify compliance with the standard.
To summarize the most important points: the amount of companies using or developing CoaXPress products has increased further, and late 2017 the first certified products can be expected which can benefit from the increased data transfer rate of 12.5 Gbit/s per connected cable!