CoaXPress Roadmap – Status at June 2022

The current v2.1 version of the CoaXPress standard was released in February 2021. The latest enhancements including improvements since v2.0 are:

• Speed:  A key aim of CoaXPress is to support the fastest cameras on the market. CoaXPress v2.0 adds two additional speeds – 10 Gbps (CXP-10) and 12.5 Gbps (CXP-12). This doubles the cable bandwidth, so for example a 4-core cable can provide 4 GBytes/sec of data continuously and reliably from camera to frame grabber.

• Multi-destination:  To allow for even faster cameras, v2.0 allows a single camera to send data to more than one frame grabber, which could be in different PCs.

• Uplink Speed:   The uplink speed is also doubled for CXP-10 and CXP-12, so allowing trigger rates over 500kHz without requiring a dedicated high speed uplink cable.

• GenICam:  Support for the industry standard GenICam is further enhanced by the addition of GenICam-compliant event packets. This allows the camera to signal events to the PC.  Support will be added for 3D-data formats that have been recently added to GenICam.

• GenDC: Since 2.1 CoaXPress includes support for GenDC, a GenICam module that defines how image data is structured, transmitted or received independent of its format, including complex image formats such as 3D.

• Micro-BNC: A new connector type, the Micro-BNC, is added. It is compact and robust, while also supporting CXP-10 and CXP-12 speeds.

• CoaXPress over Fiber is an add-on to the version 2.1 specification. It enables fiber optic links to work with the CoaXPress protocol.

Longer Term Roadmap

The major updates and improvements in version 2.0 and 2.1 ensures that CoaXPress stays the go to standard for very high-speed camera systems. Speed of course will continue to be improved as technology progresses.