TI DM350 based Digital Still Camera

Executive Summary

Texas Instruments recommended eInfochips as a design house to one of its customers for developing their product idea based on the TI DM350 Digital Media processor family.

eInfochips worked together closely with both the customer and with Texas Instruments to realize their solution. eInfochips’ team carried out design and development of TI DM350 based board to develop digital still camera. The camera was 3.1 Megapixal with 4X zoom, facilitating taking pictures in all lighting conditions with an inbuilt memory to store the captured images.

With our strong expertise in developing products based on TI’s platforms, we enabled our customer to execute the project of digital still camera and enabled them in reducing time and project cost over 35%.

The Customer

Our customer was a leading player in the consumer appliances industry. They were looking to develop a next-gen digital still camera for which they contacted Texas Instruments to choose the correct processor platform.  TI recommended eInfochips as the best design-house to help the customer realize their digital media processor based product solution.

The Challenge

  • SoC, board port of u-boot, Linux Kernel 2.6.18 on DM350 based board
  • Porting ARM-GCC tool-chain with uClibc, ARM-EABI support for MontaVista Professional Linux 4.0
  • Developing VPFE with CCD image sensor having 10M pixel resolution
  • 4-bit hardware ECC support to NAND for u-boot and open source DaVinci Linux 2.6.18

The Solution

Design & Development      

We carried out various designs and developments to execute the project of TI DM350 based Digital Still Camera.

  • We carried out porting of u-boot 1.1.4 for TI DM350 based board and team eInfochips has executed the Porting ARM-GCC tool chain with uClibc library support
  • We  also did Porting open source DaVinci Linux 2.6.18 for DM350 based board and integrated the file system with ext2 and jffs2 support
  • Device Drivers development & porting:
    • VPBE, VPFE, NAND, MMC/SD Card, I2C, Audio (AIC12), McBSP, USB (host and gadget) (RNDIS support), UART, High Resolution Timer, Pulse Width Modulation, Watchdog Timer, DMA, GPIO
  • To  carry out testing we have developed applications to test various interfaces
  • We have enhanced our support by developing sample application to demonstrate the usage of drivers

Technology

  • DM350 based platform
  • Linux Kernel 2.6.18
  • Professional Linux 4.0

The Benefit

  • eInfochips enabled the customer to complete the product development at a 35% lower project cost by leveraging expertise in the area of TI digital media processor technology based development
  • As per our brand promise of “on time every time”, we provided a market-ready solution to the customer with successful development and proper testing, which enabled the customer to successfully release their product on time at the first go to capture maximum market share
  • Our expertise enabled the customer in reducing their team size remarkably as eInfochips took 100% responsibility for the camera design and development