Wednesday, April 25, 2018

High Speed SERDES Technology Enables High Frame Rates, Potentially

EETimes: With the emergence of 112 Gbps per lane SERDES technology and wide adoption of 56 Gbps per lane, the 12.8 Tbps single-chip switches from different companies have reached the market. This enables a data infrastructure for high frame rate and high resolution imaging systems. For instance, an 8K video with 16b per pixel can transferred at more than 24,000 fps speed through this data pipe. Now, once the data transfer technology is ready and the wafer stacking technology is mature, we could design image sensors supporting this speed and find an application for them. Or, may be, find the application first.

4 comments:

  1. But does it fit on a phone is the real question of application and usability!
    :D

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    Replies
    1. Well, in terms of the interface design, it's not entirely unthinkable. Not sure about the newer 112 Gb systems, but the older Broadcom 56Gb SERDES reportedly has about 3mm2 area and 200mW power, both Rx and Tx. We only need Tx on the sensor side. Say, it takes 1/3 of the power and area. The 200 lanes needed for 12.8 Tb aggregated bandwidth take 200mm2 area and 14W power. A 3000mAh battery would last for about 40min under this load.

      Assuming this is technically possible, what is the use case for that?

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    2. I dont think there is a use case in phones for 112 Gbps yet, but a single lane would probably save space and power.

      I see a few use cases for high frame rates at full resolution right now:
      1. Obviously for slow motion high resolution video
      2. Alternating exposure time HDR video. (video exposure bracketing)
      3. For better video quality (downsampled are better then native because of bayer pattern)
      4. For smarter stacking of stills. Movement detection by area and area selective stacking techniques for noise supression.

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  2. In robotics you need to increase the framerate if the camera should take the role of an encoder in a servo control loop. There could probably be applications in this direction that are currently not possible due to current bandwidth limits.

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