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MultiCam Boards Documentation > MultiCam Documentation > MultiCam User Guide > General Topics > Frame Grabber Topics > Common to Area-Scan and Line-Scan > FIFO-Based Frame Grabber

FIFO-Based Frame Grabber

FIFO-based frame grabber

The grabber is a set of hardware resources taking in charge all timing and control task required by the camera, and conditioning the video data (analog or digital) provided by the camera.

The FIFO buffer is an internal storage area able to hold a part of the image issued by the camera, usually a few video lines. FIFO means "First In, First Out".

The DMA controller is a device able to transfer the buffered data from the FIFO to the host computer memory in a DMA (Direct Memory Access) fashion. This transfer does not require any host CPU intervention.

Usually, the host computer is a PC and the peripheral bus is a PCI bus.

The destination area in the memory is called a "surface". A surface is a memory container able to store a bi-dimensional image corresponding to a frame (area-scan) or a page (line-scan).

In the FIFO-based frame grabber, the camera-to-buffer transfer cannot be decoupled from the buffer-to-surface transfer. The goal of the grabber is to directly feed the host memory.