Tiny surveillance camera has Linux smarts

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Mar. 07, 2007

Nuvation is demonstrating an ultra-compact, Linux-powered, intelligent IP camera reference design, at the TI Developer Conference in Dallas this week. The engineering consultancy firm says its camera can encode and stream D1 (720x480) video over Ethernet at 30fps.

(Click for larger view of Nuvation IP camera design)

The Nuvation design measures just 3.25 x 1.7 x 1.8 inches (79 x 43 x 47mm), yet it incorporates a full 300MHz ARM9 processor capable of running Linux or another embedded OS, according to the company. Compared to DSP-only cameras, this lets customers tune resolutions and data rates as required, fuse codecs, or run image analysis applications such as motion detection on the camera itself -- consistent with security industry trends toward higher-quality "intelligent" cameras, the company says.

The Nuvation design is based on a stacked arrangement of passively cooled PCBs (printed circuit boards) measuring 38mm square. The design draws less than 5 Watts, and supports Power-over-Ethernet.

Nuvation IP camera design
The Nuvation camera design is based on a TI TMS320DM6446, one of the first shipping RISC/DSP SoCs (system-on-chip processors) in TI's "DaVinci" line of video-enabled DSPs (digital signal processors) and RISC/DSPs. The TMS320DM6446 weds a C64x+ DSP core, clocked at 594 MHz, with a little-endian ARM926EJ-S core clocked at 297MHz.

daVinci DM644x architecture diagram
In addition to a TI DaVinci RISC/DSP chip, the Nuvation design also incorporates Pixim's "Orca" chipset, said to implement patented image processing features likely to increase the chances of positive subject identification in video surveillance applications.

Nuvation iP camera block diagram
The Nuvation camera design is said to support codecs that include H.264, H.263, MPEG-4, and motion-JPEG.

Availability

Nuvation's IP camera reference design is available now for licensing. The design includes PCB design source files, bills of materials, optimized Linux board support package (BSP), Pixim processor firmware, mechanical enclosure, design documentation, and support. Nuvation also provides design customization and ODM production services, it says.

A similar Linux- and DaVinci-based surveillance camera reference design is available from Nexvision.

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