Direct sensor-FPGA communication reduces latency
RS Components has announced the availability of the Digilent Pcam 5C fixed focus color imaging module, designed for use with FPGA development boards. The Pcam 5C is a reliable and affordable peripheral for electronic engineers who design devices that incorporate camera applications. The Pcam 5C is based on the Omnivision OV5 5640-megapixel image sensor, which includes several internal processing features such as automatic white balance, automatic black level calibration, and controls for adjusting saturation, hue, gamma, and sharpness to improve image quality. picture quality.
The Pcam 5C module is supplied with a focus lens mounted on a standard M12 lens for interchangeability. It is installed on a small PCB (4,0 x 2,5 cm) with a 1×7 straight connector to access auxiliary camera signals. Among the output formats are: RAW10, RGB565, CCIR656, YUV422/420 and YCbCr422. Data transfer between the image sensor and the main development board is done via the MIPI CSI-2 dual-lane interface, which provides sufficient bandwidth for streaming video formats such as 1080p (full HD) at 30 frames per second and 720p (standard HD) at 60 images per second.
The physical connection is a 15-pin Flexible Flat Cable (FFC) that has pin compatibility with the popular Raspberry Pi camera connector; the Pcam 5C is supplied with a 10 cm FFC cable. Digilent, a specialist in training design tools, has designed the Pcam 5C to be used specifically with its Zybo Z7 ARM/FPGA development board, and both are available as an "Integrated Vision Package." The Zybo Z7 board features a dual-core ARM Cortex-9 processor incorporating Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA logic in a single SoC. The Pcam connector on the Z7 board allows direct communication between the image sensor and the FPGA, achieving much lower latency than HDMI or USB alternatives.
Because licensing is expensive and developing a MIPI CSI-2 controller implementation for FPGAs is complicated and time consuming, Digilent supplies a set of Vivado IP cores that work with the Pcam 5C on Xilinx FPGA and Zynq mainboards. With no proprietary CSI-2 decoder hardware, users can watch the decoding being done via the FPGA.
