Freescale Advances Driver Assistance Market with Smart Camera Technology

Many of today’s car buyers are demanding more infotainment and safety features, including front, rear-facing and surround-view cameras. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed a mandate that would require all U.S. passenger vehicles to implement rear-facing camera technology in the near future. The regulation is intended to address the dangerous blind zones behind vehicles that NHTSA estimates cause 292 deaths and 18,000 injuries each year. The European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP) standards are also increasingly focusing on active pedestrian safety.

Automakers face a number of challenges as they work to improve vehicle safety through applications such as vehicle-mounted cameras for improved pedestrian detection. With regulators predicting vehicle cameras and viewing screens will cost the auto industry as much as $2.7 billion a year or around $160 to $200 per vehicle, cost is a major concern. Freescale’s SCP2200 solution minimizes the bill of material by integrating high-density memory and allows for camera miniaturization.

The parallel image processing architecture of the Freescale SCP2200 family enables concurrent processing of image data, which translates into high performance at lower clock frequency than competitors’ current offerings. This level of performance is delivered with market-leading power consumption and cost effectiveness.

“Freescale is working to make new, advanced technologies more accessible for the mainstream automotive market,” said Ray Cornyn, Freescale’s vice president of automotive microcontrollers. “The SCP2200 family provides highly integrated, cost-effective solutions for smart automotive camera applications, while also offering industry-leading performance at very low power. This technology makes smart camera technology practical for most vehicle markets and provides significant safety benefits.”

“CogniVue is pleased to collaborate with Freescale on this complete enablement offering including optimized toolkits and development libraries,” said Simon Morris, CEO of CogniVue Corporation. “The SCP2200 is available with comprehensive software and hardware reference solutions that will accelerate the development of outstanding ADAS products.”

The cost, power and size advantages of the SCP2200 family will enable a high fitting rate in all car segments and ensure a significant increase of road safety.

As part of its continued focus on providing comprehensive software and tools support and enabling designers to bring their applications to life, Freescale, in cooperation with CogniVue, also plans to provide a software development kit, reference design solution and prototype design camera module to accompany the SCP2200 ICPs. This comprehensive solution set, in addition to the cost-effective, low-power SCP2200 processors, helps reduce a customer’s time to market.

SCP2200 key features
ARM926EJ RISC CPU main processor
Image cognition processor capable of up to 34 billion operations per second
MPEG-4 video encoding at 30 frames per second
MPEG-4, H.264 video decoding at 30 frames per second
10-bit imager interface supporting YUV and native JPEG compressed data formats
Video output: up to 24-bit, NTSC and PAL
128 Mbit SDRAM in package for image data processing
Comprehensive software development kit for image cognition processing applications
Reference design solution including SCP2202 image cognition processor
WVGA LCD
1Gb SDRAM
touch screen controller

Prototype design camera module SCP2200 based smart camera design

Availability and Pricing
The SCP2200 family is available now in limited quantities. Contact a Freescale sales representative for pricing.