The design and implementation of a chipset for the endoscopic Micro-Ball

A chipset, including one master chip and six same slave chips, is designed and implemented for the endoscopic Micro-Ball, which has six cameras to minimize the blind area while examining the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract. For lowering power consumption, a multi-level clock management for the whole chipset is implemented. A power and area efficient 4 × 4 JPEG image compressor with high image quality is integrated into the slave chip to reduce energy consumption and save FLASH memory space. The master chip and slave chip have been fabricated in 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The experimental results show that the designed chipset for Micro-Ball can support different image frame rates: from 1fps to 6fps with 480×480 image resolution. The power consumption of the chipset is 1.6mW@2fps. The power consumption of the Micro-Ball is estimated about 6mW@2fps. It can work for more than 15 hours, powered by a 1.55V@60mAh battery.