SCAMP Vision Sensor, a full-stack project from silicon device to analysis software
https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/p.dudek/scamp/default.htm#Architecture
I attended this workshop yesterday by Prof. Dudek at IISc, Bengaluru. SCAMP is an extensive project well documented with tool support. This basically is a supercool vision sensor(camera) optimized and light weight suitable for robotics, VR, automotive, surveillance applications.
The specialty is that everything is customized from the silicon level which makes the camera process at insane FPS. Open sourced at https://scamp.gitlab.io/scamp5d_doc/
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What architecture is the parallel processor based on? I can't tell from the docs.
Yeah, so this chip is a complete custom design involving analog and digital registers. What is in this image is a single pixel(photodiode being the light sensitive analog block generating current) an 256x256 array of such interconnected blocks are made.
This array connects to a LPC4357 MCU where the control firmware is running. Pixels are addressable and basically a bunch of matrix operations are done to play with different optimization algorithms. They have a custom instruction-set built for it. C++ libraries, Assembly programming can be used from there on to build all application level stuff.
https://scamp.gitlab.io/scamp5d_doc/_p_a_g_e__i_n_t_r_o__d_e_v_i_c_e.html#sec_s5_pe
"The instruction set includes operations on analog registes such as copy, add, subtract, negate, divide-by-2, compare-against-0"
Interesting thing is - these values gathered at the analog registers decay over time(inherently because as the surrounding light changes and objects move, analog value read by each pixels vary). The pixel read rate by the MCU should be faster than that decay.
whoa! is this a totally r&d chip for academic purposes? lots of r&d dollars...
yes seems like haha. over 20yrs of time, they've taped out 6+ revisions of this chip.
25yrs actually. Seems this was Prof. Dudek's PhD thesis in 1999