Connecting Sony sensors to Xilinx FPGAs for the Asian market

Vieworks serves doctors, health professionals and patients, with high value and high quality diagnostic images. The aim is to contribute improvements to both the health and the medical industries by creating innovative alternative signal processing technologies. These technologies enable the delivery of advanced imaging solutions, ease of operation, and simple installation. 

The in-house R&D team of Vieworks designs, develops, and manufactures their latest vision products and systems with Sony’s 3rd generation CMOS sensors and the powerful Xilinx platform, both of which are seamlessly connected by the FRAMOS SLVS-EC RX IP Core for Kintex-7.

Ryan Kyung, Head of Sales and Marketing at Vieworks, explained: “In order to take full advantage of the outstanding performance of Sony’s latest CMOS sensors with the SLVS-EC interface as well as Xilinx FPGAs and SoCs, we had only two options: develop a dedicated interface by ourselves or use the FRAMOS IP Core. We have chosen FRAMOS’ IP Core because it provides a faster speed interface, thanks to its flexible and configurable lanes support, which is especially critical for designing ultra-high-resolution cameras. 

“FRAMOS’ professional and efficient guidance and technical support was also a deciding factor. A simplified design and useful sample codes are always welcomed by our engineers. The biggest advantage for us in partnering with FRAMOS is saving time and development resources. The FRAMOS solution helps us to keep our internal R&D team focused on new product release, while creating excellent-performance driven devices with a faster time to market.”

André Brela, Product Manager at FRAMOS, added: “The FRAMOS SLVS-EC RX IP Core is the first solution for easy sensor interfacing with Sony’s latest CMOS imagers, coupled with high-capacity and high-performance FPGAs from Xilinx. We are extremely proud to have an industry leader like Vieworks choose our IP Core, which is perfectly aligned with the core value of FRAMOS: to enable machines to see and think for better quality of life. Device builders and camera vendors can de-risk the sensor design and implementation, while significantly reducing the development efforts and accelerating their time to market.”

The proprietary FRAMOS FPGA module, available with an Evaluation Kit, connects SONY’s latest and future image sensor interfaces with up to eight lanes at 2.3Gbps each. In addition, this module provides three to four times higher bandwidth, higher resolutions, and, a simplified system design compared to SubLVDS. It enables vision engineers to readily and seamlessly upgrade to Sony’s new interface technology and create high-performance vision solutions. 

The SLVS-EC RX IP Core is currently available and compatible with Xilinx’ Artix-7 and Kintex-7 releases.