May 9, 2015

NC393 Development progress: Multichannel memory controller for the multi-sensor camera

by Andrey Filippov

Development of the NC393 camera has just passed an important milestone  – we completed HDL code that constitutes the core of this new camera, tested most of the Zynq-specific features that were not available in the older Spartan-3 FPGA used in our current NC353 devices. Next development phase  will involve porting some of the existing code that deals with sensor interfacing, gamma correction, histograms, color conversion and JPEG/JP4 compression – code that was tested in the thousands of cameras and many billions of processed images, including the applications listed in Wikipedia. New camera is designed primarily for the multisensor applications – up to four connected directly to the system board and more through the multiplexers as we currently do in Eyesis4π cameras. It is the memory controller that had to be redesigned completely, the sensor and compressor channels can reuse most of the existing code and just have 4 instances of the same modules instead of a single one. Starting early this year I’ve got an opportunity to put aside other projects and work full time on the new camera code.
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