Preliminary
General Description and Architecture
The Karbon-CL family
Version F.0
BitFlow, Inc.
KBN-1-1
General Description and Architecture
Chapter 1
1.1 The Karbon-CL family
The purpose of this chapter is to explain, at a block diagram level, how the Karbon-CL
works, and what different versions are available. There are four main models in the
Karbon-CL family:
KBN-PCE-CL2-D, supports two base CL cameras
KBN-PCE-CL2-F, supports one medium, full or 10-tap CL camera
KBN-PCE-CL4-D, supports four base CL camers
KBN-PCE-CL4-F, supports two medium, full or 10-tap CL cameras
The differences between the models are explained in more detail in Section 1.4.
1.1.1 Virtual vs. Hardware
It’s important to understand how this manual works. Some chapters of this manual dis-
cuss the Karbon-CL as a hardware platform (this chapter is a good example). While
other chapters discuss the details of the virtual frame grabbers (VFG) that this hard-
ware platform supports. The concept of the virtual frame grabber is described below,
but basically the idea is that one hardware platform can support more than one
device. In the case of the Karbon-CL, these devices are frame grabbers.
Note that we are not using the word virtual here in the sense of “a software virtualiza-
tion of a hardware device”, these VFGs are real hardware. The reason we using “vir-
tual” is because the term “frame grabber” has more than one meaning. It can mean
the piece of hardware that you put in your computer, or it can mean the device that
the your software application is controlling and getting images from. For the pur-
poses of this manual, “virtual frame grabber” means the device that your application
is interfacing to. While this might sound complicated, the implementation is simple.
You plug our Karbon-CL frame grabber into your PC, and your application interacts
with one or more VFGs available. Everything else is taken care of by the BitFlow driv-
ers.
1.1.2 The Virtual Frame Grabber (VFG)
The Karbon family is the first board from BitFlow that supports the concept of the vir-
tual frame grabber (VFG). The idea behind the VFG is to separate the hardware plat-
form (connectors, laminate, FPGAs, etc.) from the frame grabbing functionality that
software applications work with. The primary reason behind this separation is that the
turn around time for hardware is much longer than the turn around time for modifying
virtual frame grabbers. To create a brand new vitual frame grabber, or to modify an
exising one, simply requires writing new firmware or updating existing firmware.
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