For an application that is not dissimular to a digital camera, we are searching for a micro with CCD, LCD and USB 2.0 interface.
The product must show 'live' images on the LCD (low resolution, maybe
320x240 or even lower). When a button is pressed, we need to take a full-size (5 MegaPixel) image and send that to a PC in raw format. The target transfer time is 2 seconds which rules out USB 1.1 for these 15MB (@ 8-bit RGB) or even 22.5MB (@ 12-bit RGB) pictures. As the pictures are large, I suspect we need some SDRAM to temporarely store them.The product will only sell 100's a year.
We did find a few camera ARM chips, but most only have USB 1.1. The one USB 2.0 we did find is not an opton. We need to order at least 50K pieces before they even start to mention a price.
Another option we'd like to investigate is using an FPGA with a few IP cores dropped in: SDRAM controller, USB 2.0 device, LCD controller, camera interface (CCD, firewire or LVDS?) and maybe even a CPU core or place a small CPU next to it.
As we have no experience with this kind of FPGA development (we only did a few smallish FPGA projects), I have no idea what to expect in terms of development time and licence costs. Any insights there?