e-con Systems announces support of 3.2M pixel camera for OMAP 35xx series of processors

May 27, 2009 - PRLog -- Taking forward its leadership over the CMOS camera support for the various Application Processors, e-con has now announced the CMOS camera boards available for TI OMAP35x Evaluation Modules. e-con’s camera daughter board, e-CAM32_OMAP35x can be directly interfaced on the TI TMDXEVM3503 EVM board.  Logically, the e-CAM32_OMAP35x connects to the high speed CMOS sensor interface of the TI OMAP 35x.

The TI OMAP35x processors offer tremendous processing power thanks to the Superscalar ARM Cortex-A8 core running at 600MHz. The higher end variants of this CPU (OMAP3525 and OMAP3530) support a C64x DSP and Video accelerator making it an ideal CPU for high-end real-time image processing. E-con’s camera solution is a logical extension to leverage the real-time image processing power available in the OMAP35x CPU. The e-CAM32_OMAP35x Windows CE driver closely integrates with the IVA2.2 (Image, Video and Audio Subsystem) Accelerator subsystem. This enables the application developer to fully utilize the advanced features available in the OMAP35x CPU.
On the Camera ISP backend, the e-CAM32_OMAP35x camera module nicely integrates with the 8-bit parallel camera interface in SYNC mode. This interface can support up to 130MHZ for 8-bit parallel camera data. With this clock, e-con has achieved capturing of video at 30fps at D1/VGA resolution from the e-CAM32_OMAP35x camera daughter board.

The e-CAM driver also supports CCDC block inside the OMAP CPU, but not much processing is done inside CCDC for YUV422 format input data. However, the camera driver for OMAP35x is coupled closely with the Resizer block of the OMAP35x to support up scaling/downscaling by a factor of 4 to 0.25. A typical example of this would be that the 5mega-pixel (2560 X  1920 pixel) input image can be resized to VGA (640x 480) size without any software overhead by programming the Resizer block through the camera driver. This feature comes really handy for real-time image processing applications where the incoming images are to be scaled and provided for image analysis.

The camera module mounted on e-CAM32_OMAP35x is based on Omnivision OV3640 CMOS image sensor. The camera module runs  Auto focus algorithm for driving the lens assembly. Please visit www.e-consystems.com/camerasensor.asp for more information on the 3.2M pixel camera module. Other than that, e-CAM32_OMAP35x supports flash for applications that require image capture at low lighting. e-con’s camera daughter board, e-CAM32_OMAP35x can be directly interfaced on the TI TMDXEVM3503 EVM board. The camera module is supported with Windows CE 6.0 camera driver with directshow support in an installer format. Both binary and source code versions of the driver are available in the same installer format to be installed on the host PC, where the OMAP BSP is installed.

The e-CAM32_OMAP35x can be bought by customers who have the TI OMAP EVM kit and are considering integrating camera on their product. Also, customers who have bought other development boards and would like to integrate the e-CAM32_OMAP35x on their board can contact e-con at the below mentioned contact details.  The e-CAM32_OMAP35x comes with Windows CE 6.0 binary drivers with sample application for image capture using the autofocus camera. The sample application is provided with source code and API for building custom applications on top of the e-CAM32_OMAP35x.

Contact
Harishankkar
Phone: +1-636-898-8788, +91-44-42033600
www.e-consystems.com
email: sales@e-consystems.com

# # #

e-con Systems, acknowledged by Microsoft as Windows Embedded Silver Partner offers services like Hardware Design, Firmware design and Embedded Software development, Board Design, Linux, WinCE/Windows Mobile and VxWorks - Board Support Packages