June 30, 2014

Open Hardware Lens for Eyesis4π camera

by Oleg Dzhimiev

initial_design_snapshot_2

 

Elphel has embarked on a new project, somewhat different from our main field of designing digital cameras, but closely related to the camera applications and aimed to further improve image quality of Eyesis4π camera. Eyesis4π is a high resolution full-sphere panoramic and stereophotogrammetric camera. It is a tiled multi-sensor system with a single sensor’s format of 1/2.5″. The specific requirement of such system is uniform angular resolution, since there is no center in a panoramic image.

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June 20, 2014

DDR3 Memory Interface on Xilinx Zynq SOC – Free Software Compatible

by Andrey Filippov

External memory controller is an important part of many FPGA-centered designs, it is true for Elphel cameras too. When I was working on the board design for NC393 I tried to verify inteface pinout using the code output from the MIG (Memory Interface Generator) module. I was planning to use MIG code as a reference design and customize it for application in the camera, adding more functionality to our previous designs. Memory interface is a rather intimate part of the design where FPGA approach can shine it all its glory – advance knowledge of the types of needed memory transactions (in contrast with the general CPU system memory) helps to increase performance by planning bank and address sequences, crafting memory mapping to utilize close to 100% of the bus bandwidth.

eddr3_bdiag

Fig. 1. DDR3 memory controller block diagram, source code at https://git.elphel.com/Elphel/eddr3

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