Freescale introduces new family of image cognition processors for automotive camera applications

22 October 2012

Freescale Semiconductor introduced a new family of image cognition processors (ICPs) for the driver assistance market. The SCP2200 family features CogniVue’s APEX IP technology and is suited for automotive smart camera applications. The family, along with the accompanying libraries, hardware and software development kits, gives automakers a set of tools to design smart camera applications.

SCP2200 family block diagram. Click to enlarge.

Many of today’s car buyers are demanding more infotainment and safety features, including front, rear-facing and surround-view cameras. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed a mandate that would require all US passenger vehicles to implement rear-facing camera technology in the near future. The regulation is intended to address the dangerous blind zones behind vehicles that NHTSA estimates cause 292 deaths and 18,000 injuries each year. The European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP) standards are also increasingly focusing on active pedestrian safety.

Automakers face a number of challenges as they work to improve vehicle safety through applications such as vehicle-mounted cameras for improved pedestrian detection. With regulators predicting vehicle cameras and viewing screens will cost the auto industry as much as $2.7 billion a year or around $160 to $200 per vehicle, cost is a major concern. Freescale’s SCP2200 solution minimizes the bill of material by integrating high-density memory and allows for camera miniaturization, the company says.

The parallel image processing architecture of the Freescale SCP2200 family enables concurrent processing of image data, which translates into high performance at lower clock frequency than other current offerings.

Freescale is working to make new, advanced technologies more accessible for the mainstream automotive market. The SCP2200 family provides highly integrated, cost-effective solutions for smart automotive camera applications, while also offering industry-leading performance at very low power. This technology makes smart camera technology practical for most vehicle markets and provides significant safety benefits.

—Ray Cornyn, Freescale’s vice president of automotive microcontrollers

Freescale, in cooperation with CogniVue, also plans to provide a software development kit, reference design solution and prototype design camera module to accompany the SCP2200 ICPs.

SCP2200 key features include:

• ARM926EJ RISC CPU main processor
• Image cognition processor capable of up to 34 billion operations per second
• MPEG-4 video encoding at 30 frames per second
• MPEG-4, H.264 video decoding at 30 frames per second
• 10-bit imager interface supporting YUV and native JPEG compressed data formats
• Video output: up to 24-bit, NTSC and PAL
• 128 Mbit SDRAM in package for image data processing
• Comprehensive software development kit for image cognition processing applications
• Reference design solution including SCP2202 image cognition processor
• WVGA LCD
• 1Gb SDRAM
• touch screen controller
• Prototype design camera module
• SCP2200 based smart camera design

The SCP2200 family is available now in limited quantities.

CogniVue is a leading provider of Image Cognition Processors (ICP) and software for embedded vision systems. The core technology is built on its proprietary, flexible, massively-parallel APEX vision processor engine.