eISP: a Programmable Processing Architecture for Smart Phone Image Enhancement

Today’s smart phones, with their embedded highresolution video sensors, require computing capacities that are too high to easily meet stringent silicon area and power consumption requirements (some one and a half square millimeters and half a watt) especially when programmable components are used. To develop such capacities, integrators still rely on dedicated low resolution video processing components, whose drawback is low flexibility. With this in mind, our paper presents eISP – a new, fully programmable Embedded Image Signal Processor architecture, now validated in TSMC 65nm technology to achieve a capacity of 16.8 GOPs at 233 MHz, for 1.5 mm of silicon area and a power consumption of 250 mW. Its resulting efficiency (67 MOPs/mW), has made eISP the leading programmable architecture for signal processing, especially for HD 1080p video processing on embedded devices such as smart phone.