Cmosis, the leading European supplier of advanced CMOS image sensor solutions, is proud to announce that its recently acquired AWAIBA group was honored with Best Student Paper Award at the Electronic Imaging Conference, held in conjunction with Photonics West in San Francisco, CA, USA. Ricardo Sousa was granted the award for his Master Thesis "Multi-camera Synchronization Core Implemented on a USB3-based Platform.". The work was supported by AWAIBA Lda, based in Funchal, Madeira/Portugal.
Based on AWAIBA’s NanEye CMOS image sensor and an FPGA platform with USB3 interface, the paper demonstrated a new technique to enable external synchronization of up to eight individual self-timed very-small-form-factor (1x1 mm² or smaller) camera modules with four-wire interfaces for applications such as stereo vision or 3D image reconstruction with multiple cameras.
Sousa tackled this challenge by adaptively regulating the power supply for each of the cameras by means of a control core to constantly monitor the operating frequency of each camera, measuring the line period in each frame based on a sampling signal. Frequency is adjusted by varying the voltage level based on the error between the measured line period and the desired line period.
The method outlined in the paper achieves an exact synchronization of the cameras with a time gap of less than 4 µsec between each image capture. To ensure phase synchronization between frames, a master-slave interface was implemented. A single camera is defined as the Master, with its operating frequency being controlled directly through a PC based interface.
The paper selected for the coveted award is Ricardo Sousa's Master Thesis, which he carried out at the University of Madeira Interactive Technology Institute under the supervision of Prof Morgado Dias (http://www.m-iti.org/). The work was supported by Eng. P. Santos from AWAIBA Lda. of Funchal, Madeira/Portugal, a business unit of CMOSIS, Antwerp, Belgium. The award was presented by Dr Antoine Dupret of the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique.
“This latest success of an important development project coming out of AWAIBA's experienced design department proves that AWAIBA is a natural fit for CMOSIS," said Luc De Mey, CMOSIS Chairman and CEO. "The resources AWAIBA brings to CMOSIS as a pure-play supplier of a broad range of unique high-performance CMOS sensors to meet the increased demand of existing and emerging imaging applications. AWAIBA's products are broadening our activities in market segments complementary to our products. It also strengthens our relationship with our existing customer base."
