[ Design of a Digital Camera ]

Projekttitel: Design of a Digital Camera

Kontaktperson: Jan Madsen, bygning 322.221, jm@imm.dtu.dk

Beskrivelse: Embedded systems are becoming a more and more important part of modern IT-systems. These embedded systems are characterized by executing a very  limited set of functions repeatedly, having tight constraints, for instance on power consumption due to being battery powered, and being reactive, i.e. continually reacting to changes in the system's environment, often with real time requirements. The focus of this project is to study embedded systems design through the design of a digital camera.

The objective of the project is to model and design a digital camera using SystemC as the modelling language. The core of the project is to design the digital kernel of the camera, i.e. the image compression, using JPEG, memory management and general camera control. The charge-coupled device (CCD) and the A2D and D2A circuits converting analog images to digital and digital to analog, should be modelled as part of the environment, i.e. the
testbench.

The design process consists of several phases:

• Specification, an abstract system level model of the camera has to be developed and simulated.
• Exploration, various design alternatives should be investigated, i.e. a pure software implementation using a microcontroller or embedded processor (MIPS like). A pure hardware implementation.
• Hardware design should be refined to a synthesizable description, synthesized using Synopsys.
• The implemented design should be measured according to chip size, code size, performance and power consumption.

A key aspect of the project is to develop a systematic method to get from the abstract system level model to a combined hardware/software
design in SystemC.

Forudsætninger: I- eller E-fagpakken, 02130 Digitale Systemer og Systems Programming