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

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 Autofocus algorithm for driving the lens assembly.