Lattice Semiconductor Introduces Three Complete Camera Reference Designs

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation announced three new complete reference designs that will help electronic original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to deliver media-rich experiences to their end-users by taking advantage of the industry-standard Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) camera, application processor and display technologies. These latest field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based reference designs from Lattice enable OEMs to build and rollout next-generation products that are reliable and consume low power as they deliver up-to-date display, image and motion features.

Using these new reference designs, designers can use image sensors that are not designed for the mobile market. As an example, a high-end smart phone could incorporate a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) type camera. In this case, the image sensor is bridged to a MIPI-based applications processor via a Lattice FPGA. The inverse is also true, where MIPI-based components can be linked to non-MIPI based processors or systems-on-chips (SoCs).

Ted Marena, director of Solutions Marketing at Lattice, will present at the Qualcomm Uplinq 2013 conference’s Hardware Day on 3 September at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront in San Diego, California (us), where he’ll talk about how Lattice’s MIPI solutions enable designers to connect a range of display and camera components to the latest MIPI-based Snapdragon processors.

Given that every customer’s system architecture is unique, each of the three new reference designs, as well as the previously announced CSI-2 receive bridge, includes a configuration form available on the Lattice website that allows designers to specify the interfaces they need and receive a hardware description language (HDL) Netlist targeting a MachXO2 or Lattice ECP3 FPGA.

• MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) Transmit Bridge: Enables a Lattice FPGA to drive a DSI-receiving device such as a DSI display
• MIPI DSI Receive Bridge: Allows an application processor to interface to a screen that is not designed for mobile applications
• MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) 2 Transmit Bridge: Provides the conversion bridge logic required to enable an applications processor to interface to a non-CSI-2 image sensor
• MIPI CSI-2 Receive Bridge: Allows a mobile CSI-2 image sensor to interface to an embedded image signal processor