High-Speed Camera Recorder Powered by MLE’s Fast FPGA RAID (FFRAID)

March 25, 2025Application Notes, Storage400Gbps, Data Recording, Fast FPGA RAID, FFRAID, High-speed Data

High-Speed Camera Recorder Powered by MLE’s Fast FPGA RAID (FFRAID)

Excelitas PCO is a pioneer in cameras and optoelectronics, offering distinct platforms for high-speed cameras for a wide range of industrial, scientific, car safety, and aerospace applications.

Challenge

The new pco.dimax series offers a unique platform of high-speed streaming cameras that enable clear images with a recording speed of over 2000 fps at a full resolution of 3.6 MPixel. This massive raw data rate of about 80 Gigabits per second (2166 frames per second * 1984 * 1808 pixels per frame * 10 bits per pixel) comes with the challenges to record this image data gapless and lossless!

MLE helped Excelitas develop the high-speed data acquisition and recording systems by implementing FFRIAD — a Fast FPGA RAID — to offload CPU-intensive tasks and achieve 80 Gbps sustained recording speeds.

Table of Contents

High-Speed Camera Recorder Powered by MLE’s Fast FPGA RAID (FFRAID)

FPGA-Based Systems With MicroTCA

Many FPGA-based systems projects are rather low volume and, therefore, favor off-the-shelf hardware over the costs and risks of custom hardware (PCB) design.
MicroTCA or mTCA or µTCA is a 20+ year old standard from PICMG for implementing embedded systems using off-the-shelf hardware. Most often MicroTCA is used for test & measurement or for scientific applications when application specific IOs and signals need to be processed where FPGAs provide the flexibility and processing performance.
However, as we will demonstrate in this Technical Brief, MicroTCA carries a huge baggage, and has little to no advantages over other approaches, namely FPGA based System-on-Modules or the “good old” PC architecture.