Services

Custom camera design

ApotheoTech designs the camera around your sensor, your data rate and your enclosure, and delivers it as a working system with its driver.

Start a projectSee what we have built
Sensor interface
Sony SLVS-EC, 1 to 8 lanes
Outputs
CoaXPress 2.1, 12G-SDI, PCIe
Recording
M.2 NVMe at PCIe Gen3 or Gen4
Host software
Linux V4L2 driver, Jetson Orin
A box camera, taken apart and put back: lens, mount, sensor board, FPGA board, interface board, housing. The boards, the logic on them and the driver behind them are the parts we design.
Custom camera design

Sensor board

Image sensor
Sensor clocks
Power rails

Processing board

FPGA design
SLVS-EC receiver
Binning and ROI
Camera link output
NVMe recording
DDR4
M.2 SSD
Supervisor MCU
Linux drivers

Host computer

PCIe DMA
V4L2 driver
/dev/video0
Your application
Block diagram of a camera system. Custom camera design covers the sensor board and the processing board. FPGA design covers the logic inside the FPGA: sensor receiver, image processing, camera link output and recording. Linux drivers cover the host computer: PCIe DMA, the V4L2 driver and the video device your application opens.
The signal path of a camera system, and the part of it each service covers.

How we work

An off-the-shelf camera stops fitting when your application fixes the sensor, the frame rate, the link or the shape of the board. From there the camera is a design project: a sensor board, a processing board, an FPGA design and the software that receives the frames.

ApotheoTech builds all four in house. The CoaXPress, SLVS-EC and NVMe cores on this site, the Aper-Oculus carrier and the capture drivers came out of our own camera work, and a custom design starts from those parts.

Bayer sensor data being turned into a color picture of a test chart
A sensor sends one color per pixel. The pipeline in the FPGA turns that into a picture, here a color test chart.

Sensor side

  • Sensor boards for Sony SLVS-EC sensors. The IMX530, IMX547 and IMX421 are running here
  • Sensor power sequencing, clocking and register bring-up from the datasheet
  • Boards up to 32 layers, with DDR4, PCIe and large BGAs
  • Other sensor interfaces: ask, and we will tell you plainly whether we have done it before

Processing and output

  • FPGA design on Kria K26 and Zynq UltraScale+ modules, or on a custom board
  • Image processing in the FPGA: binning and region of interest today, further stages per project
  • CoaXPress 2.1 output at CXP-12 on one to four lanes, with GenICam control
  • 12G-SDI and PCIe outputs
  • Recording to an M.2 NVMe drive with no processor in the write path

Host side

  • A V4L2 capture driver with zero-copy DMA, so the camera opens as a standard video device
  • Jetson Orin integration, including sources for DeepStream pipelines
  • A GenICam XML description and a viewer application for bring-up
  • Supervisor firmware for power sequencing and resets

What we have built

The Aper-Oculus carrier board turning
Aper-Oculus, our Kria K26 carrier with an SLVS-EC sensor connector.

Aper-Oculus

A Kria K26 carrier with an SLVS-EC sensor connector and an FMC slot, designed, built and brought up in house. A Sony IMX530 runs on it at 4K30 over two SLVS-EC lanes.

A CoaXPress camera link on one card

The APT-C11-FMC runs the CoaXPress Device core as a camera output and the Host core as a frame grabber, in loopback on a ZCU106.

8-channel 12G-SDI capture card

The receiving end of the same problem: eight SDI inputs into PCIe Gen3 x8 with a V4L2 driver, delivered in twelve weeks.

Typical projects

  • A complete camera: sensor board, processing board, FPGA design and driver
  • The electronics for a camera whose optics and enclosure you already have
  • A new sensor brought up on an existing platform such as the Aper-Oculus
  • A feasibility study: data rates, part selection and a block diagram before any layout

Projects are quoted at a fixed price under a statement of work, or billed as time and materials.

Related on this site

Start with a paragraph about your system

Say what the sensor or interface is, how fast the data moves and what it has to reach. We reply within one business day.

Open the contact form

ApotheoTech LLC

Orlando, Florida

info@apotheotech.com