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Date Announced: 13 May 2013
Evaluation kit accelerates liquid lens camera designs; Includes lens module, IP, and FPGA-based development board
LYON, France – May 13, 2013 – Varioptic, a Business Unit of Parrot (EURONEXT; PARRO) today announced a new evaluation kit that enables camera designers to quickly develop liquid lens camera prototypes, utilizing the company’s Caspian Module, the Lattice Semiconductor ECP3™-based HDR-60 video camera development kit, Helion IP cores, and a Sony 2.4 MP IMX136 sensor.
Varioptic's Electrowetting liquid lens technology enables extremely fast and noiseless variable focus with absolutely no moving parts. This ensures low power consumption, high shock resistance, and a large dynamic range that guarantees focus from 5cm to infinity.
The Caspian optical module, a combination of a Varioptic's Arctic liquid lens and a high-resolution imaging lens, can be implemented instantly on any M12 lens-based camera board. The module is finding wide adoption in medical, biometric, and industrial applications such as machine vision, barcode reading…
IP Enables Performance Evaluation
Helion has developed specific intellectual property (IP) blocks to evaluate the performance of Varioptic's liquid lens technology on the Lattice HDR-60 Development Kit. The Varioptic kit will be upgraded later on this year to handle Auto Focus in video mode and optical image stabilization, based on the Varioptic Baltic lens family.
“The newly available kit allows customers to evaluate more easily and rapidly our liquid lens technology in real cameras”, said Samuel Grand, Varioptic Business Unit Director. “As the platform is very flexible, the kit will be regularly upgraded with more functionality and optical options to give our customers additional camera capabilities.”
“Varioptic's liquid lens modules and Helion's IP blocks expand the technology reach of our HDR-60’s Kit's ecosystem”, said Kambiz Khalilian, Lattice Strategic Marketing Manager for Industrial Markets. “By combining our low power FPGAs with Varioptic's liquid lens technology, our customers can offer a variety of new liquid lens-based camera solutions.”
“As a new part of our IP suite IONOS, the IP blocks for controlling the Varioptic's liquid lens solution enables the camera developer to integrate an impressive focus technology into his camera in an easy and low-risk way”, says Thorsten Heimann, CFO from Helion.
Price and Availability
The evaluation kit is available for sale from Varioptic. For more information, please contact sales.varioptic@parrot.com
About the Lattice HDR-60 Video Camera Development Kit
The Lattice HDR-60 Video Camera Development Kit offers camera manufacturers several unique benefits, including a fully integrated HDR image signal processing pipeline from sensor to HDMI/DVI display. The Kit also offers the industry's fastest auto-exposure, greater than 120dB system dynamic range, a highly efficient Auto White Balance algorithm and 2D noise reduction – all in streaming mode through the FPGA without the need for an external frame buffer, enabling extremely low latency and further reducing system cost. On-board DDR2 memory also enables applications such as 3D noise reduction, image stitching from multiple sensors, image rotation and de-warping.
About Varioptic
Founded in 2002 by Bruno Berge, a PhD in physics, Varioptic became a Business Unit of Parrot SA in January 2012. Varioptic develops, designs and markets electrically controlled miniature optics based on its proprietary and patented programmable liquid lens technology. The ranges of technological solutions developed by Varioptic are aimed at a number of markets in the digital camera sector (biometrics, machine vision, general consumer and medical cameras). For more information: www.varioptic.com.
About Helion
Located in Duisburg, Germany, Helion offers a wide variety of engineering and consulting services in the field of CMOS image sensor technology and TFT display systems. Based on many years of practical experience in research and camera development, Helion offers camera manufacturers a wide variety of services to make development easy, fast and flexible. Helion offers advanced image preprocessing IP like the IONOS video pipelines and the unique High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) BLENDFEST technology to develop fast and powerful camera systems. Helion is a member of the Lattice LEADER Design Services Partners and LatticeCORE Connection Partner IP programs. For more information, visit www.HelionVision.com.
About Lattice Semiconductor
Lattice is a service-driven developer of innovative low cost, low power programmable design solutions. For more information about how our FPGA, CPLD and programmable power management devices help our customers unlock their innovation, visit www.latticesemi.com.
E-mail: olivier.jacques-sermet@parrot.com
Web Site: www.varioptic.com
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