Leuven, Belgium, May 07, 2012 — At The Vision Show, Xenics, Europe’s leading designer and manufacturer of infrared detectors, customer-specific imagers and flexible IR cameras, demonstrates its capabilities and range of proven infrared solutions. Gobi-640, the uncooled thermal camera, built on an innovative platform for demanding industrial applications, is now available in a very compact form factor with GigE-Vision interface. Also, the world’s highest-resolution SWIR line camera Lynx-1.7- 2048 is available as a replacement of complex and expensive multi-camera configurations.
Thermal Camera Gobi-640 now with GigE Interface
Gobi-640-GigE, infrared camera for the long-wave 8 to 14μm, now comes with a 640×480 image resolution and17μm pitch micro-bolometer array. It securely detects very small temperature differences down to 0.05 ºC and delivers thermal images at up to 50 Hz. Its high-performance read-out and pre-amplifier circuitry excels through detail-rich images of exceptional uniformity.
In the new Gobi-640-GigE Xenics integrates the certified industry-standard GigE interface, which is becoming increasingly popular. With GigE Vision, it is much easier for system integrators as well as end-users to directly integrate IR cameras in their proprietary setups and processes and take advantage of Xenics’ performance features for LWIR applications. Especially advantageous is the high GigE interface bandwidth of 1 Gigabit/sec. This enables real-time control for optimizing industrial processes.
The layout of Xenics’ new GigE-Vision platform is oriented towards persistent customer requirements to reduce volume, weight and power consumption, thereby opening novel applicative domains for LWIR sensors. Accommodating these demands, Xenics has shrunk the Gobi-640-GigE camera down to just 49 x 49 x 77 mm, including the GigE platform.
Another user-centric innovation: By deploying a field-programmable FPGA instead of digital signal processor (DSP) Xenics has significantly lowered power consumption, so that the camera can now be powered via the Gigabit Ethernet cable. This lowers cabling expenses and lets the camera be integrated much easier in many production environments.
“User-centric capabilities plus cost efficiency in an ultra-compact GigE Vision camera – this makes the Gobi-640-GigE a real small, if not the smallest available thermal camera on the world market,” says Xenics founder and CEO Bob Grietens. “This is a highly important achievement for us because we will migrate the concept to our Pumair and Meerkat series for security markets, thereby extending our portfolio with smaller cameras for competitive and cost-critical solutions that accommodate challenging
space restrictions.”
Highest Resolution SWIR Line Camera
With its innovative Lynx-1.7-2048, Xenics is to conquer the near infrared – 0.9 to 1.7μm – for highest-resolution line cameras. Lynx-1.7-2048 offers high optical sensibility and wide dynamic range specifically targeting scientific and medical imaging. For promising industrial applications the Lynx-1.7 2048 enables detail-rich non-destructive depth analysis in combination with optical coherence tomography (OCT).
The new Lynx version is based on Xenics’ proven linear-sensor series Xlin. It boasts the longest line length of 2048 pixels, at a 12.5 or 25μm pixel pitch and 12.5 or 250μm height, across the industry. This finely tuned layout covers a wide range of highresolution industrial and spectroscopic applications. Compared to the complexity of traditional multi-camera configurations the new highest-resolution Lynx ensures simple and low-cost solutions, even in highly demanding applications.
Due to its excellent performance data the new Lynx-1.7-2048 is especially suited for near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, which are rapidly evolving as reliable qualityassurance tools to uncover, at highest resolution, hidden defects in the tested objects. A significant future use of spectroscopy, which will see annual growth rates of 60 percent, is optical coherence tomography. OCT in the near infrared can analyze the properties of lower, hidden layers of an object. As an example in the medical realm, OCT yields cross-sectional images of the human skin without surgically invasive procedures. Lynx, with its high resolution, low background noise and very high line rates, is a perfect tool to be integrated in medical systems for skin cancer detection.
