June 9, 2015

NC393 progress update: HDL code for sensor channels is ported or re-written

by Andrey Filippov

Quick update: a new chunk of code is added to the NC393 camera FPGA project. It is a second (of three needed to match the existing NC353 functionality) major parts of the system after the memory controller is finished. This code is just written, it still has to be verified by the simulation first, and then by synthesizing and by running it on the actual hardware. We plan to do that when the third part – image compressors will be ported to the new system too. The added code deals with receiving data from the image sensors and pre-processing it before storing in the video memory. FPGA-based systems are very flexible and many other configurations like support of multi-lane serial interface sensors or using several camera ports to connect a single large high-speed sensor are possible and will be implemented later. The table below summarizes parameters of the current code only.

Table 1. NC393 Sensor Connections and Pre-processing
Feature Value
Number of sensor ports 4
Total number of multiplexed sensors 16
Total number of multiplexed sensors with existing 10359 multiplexer board 12
Sensor interface type (implemented in HDL) parallel 12 bits
Sensor interface hardware compatibility parallel LVCMOS/serial differential 8 lanes + clock
Sensor interface voltage levels programmable up to 3.3V
Number of I²C sequencers 4 (1 per port)
Number of I²C sequencers frames 16
Number of I²C sequencers commands per frame 64
I²C sequencers commands data width 16/8 bits
Image data width stored 16/8 bits per pixel
Gamma conversion regions per port 4
Histograms: number of rectangular ROI (Regions of Interest) per port 4
Histograms: number of color channels 4
Histograms: number of bins per color 256
Histograms: width per bin 18 or 32 bits
Histograms: number of histograms stored per sensor 16
(more…)