The left side of the figure illustrates a motivation for the FPIA; bringing the flexibility and reuse of the FPGA to the imaging world. The right side shows the stacked FPIA architecture, where detector array, analog interface and digital processing tiers are integrated into a single image sensor.
The Field Programmable Imaging Array (FPIA), from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, is a first-in-class device that allows designers of niche sensing applications access to unprecedented on-chip computational resources. The reconfigurable nature of the FPIA allows designers to mix and match disparate functionality to create innovative solutions to problems. Once a front end for a specific detector type is integrated, the design cycle for new applications of that detector type is greatly shortened from the existing status quo, allowing quick prototyping of new system concepts.
The objective of the FPIA is to serve processing-intensive imaging applications by creating a stacked architecture with a highly capable reconfigurable digital component that can be adapted to any type of optical detector. The high cost of this advanced digital component can be amortized over multiple applications, while enabling capabilities that would be otherwise out of reach.
The FPIA is a first-of-its-class device. It makes high-performance on-chip digital processing and field-programmability available to a broad spectrum of new imaging applications.
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