With ever increasing demand for cameras in the automotive industry, the performance of image sensors is steadily advancing at the cost of sensor complexity. Perhaps most of the added complexity is transferred to the digital signal processing, which is required to take full advantage of the sensor's data. The digital processing algorithms must be correctly configured in order to function properly. Configuring image sensors is done by setting specific values to so-called configuration registers. Configuration register values are often dependent on external parameters like temperature or production variations. Correctly configuring the sensor's every digital signal processing algorithm (usually handled by the host) is therefore becoming ever more difficult.
This thesis describes the design considerations of an in-sensor module called TNR (table based register configurator), which handles the configuration of sensor's configuration registers based on predefined commands in the form of tables. Using different tables designers can achieve various kinds of dependencies of configuration registers on numerous parameters. To help designers describe all the aforementioned dependencies, a linker was developed to convert a human readable C-like syntax into TNR binary tables. TNR was implemented in hardware of production sensors and is heavily in both production calibration and live processing.
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