Camera Link Cables & Channel Link Cables

Camera and Channel Link high speed parallel interfaces have been developed to simplify cabling and hardware implementation for distances up to 10 meters.

CAMERA LINK is a camera interfacing specification developed for high speed video frame grabber interfaces. The specification uses the 0.05 center Centronics style 26 position connector. The cable is similar to the infiniband cable, i.e. individually shielded pairs with a tight skew and jitter spec. The 28 bit wide data word is clocked over a 4 pair LVDS bus to achieve a transfer rate of 2.38 Gbit/sec in one direction.

CHANNEL LINK is similar to the Camera Link interface but with a 48 bit wide data word and the data is clocked over an 8 pair LVDS bus. The 48 bit word with a 112MHz clock allows up to 5.38 GBit/sec to be transmitted. This interface is used on high speed printers and copiers. The advantage of this bus is that dual channels can be laid into a 24 pair cable extending the data transfer rate up to 10.79 GBits/sec in one direction or 5.38 GBits/sec in two directions. Channel Link applications commonly use the 0.05 center Centronic style 50 position connector.