Point Grey Research, a provider of advanced digital camera systems, and Fresco Logic, a global fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops and sells USB 3.0 (SuperSpeed USB) connectivity solutions, have jointly launched a SuperSpeed USB-enabled digital video camera.
The prototype camera is designed and manufactured by Point Grey and uses the 3 Megapixel Sony IMX036 CMOS image sensor, which features high sensitivity, superior colour fidelity, low power, and no smear. The sensor also supports an HD 1,080p60 mode, which allows the camera to output raw, uncompressed 1,920 x 1,080 pixel images at 60fps. Point Grey's own software driver provides low-level control of the camera via the USB 3.0 bus. The camera is connected to a USB 3.0 interface card on the host side, which is powered by the FL1000, a PCI Express to SuperSpeed USB Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) host controller chip from Fresco Logic. The host PC uses an Intel i5-based P7P55D motherboard from ASUS.
One of the potential benefits of the increased bandwidth of USB 3.0 is that it allows the main processor to handle compression. Therefore, different types of compression can be used for different applications and that some applications, like face recognition, can work on uncompressed video data for increased performance.
