Aper-Oculus Kria Camera Carrier Board Crowdfunding Campaign Goes Live
The campaign is now live for the Aper-Oculus carrier board which facilitates high-speed camera app development with the Kria K26 SOM.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about the announcement of the Aper-Oculus carrier board for AMD's Kria K26 system-on-module (SOM) being launched by ApotheoTech LLC on Crowd Supply. The Aper-Oculus is optimized for high-speed camera applications for embedded vision and edge AI development on the Kria K26 SOM with its wide array of connectivity options including FMC, MIPI, 6G SATA, DisplayPort TX, and two-lane SLVS-EC connector.
As a brief refresher, a SOM is a board-level circuit that contains all of the bare bones functionality of a system in a single PCB or "module". In the case of the Kria K26, the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC XCK26 FPGA is the "system" and the bare bones functionality circuits are the power conditioning circuitry, DDR, eMMC, QSPI, and low-profile 240-pin connectors with access to the user-configurable I/O of the FPGA.
A SOM is intended to isolate the common circuity for a processing core such that the design focus can shift more so to the peripherals for the target uses/applications with the carrier board is it on. The Aper-Oculus is notable because it is one of the early custom carrier boards for the Kria SOMs that we saw on the market.
The Aper-Oculus stands out not only for its numerous camera/vision interface options with dual DisplayPort, USB 3.0, MIPI connectors, and SATA I/O, but the fact that it is built around the Scalable Low-Voltage Signaling with Embedded Clock (SLVS-EC) standard from Sony for high-speed/quality video input.
The Aper-Oculus is currently the only carrier board available for the K26 SOM equipped with the SLVS-EC standard and FMC connector. The SLVS-EC standard is the key for really being able to take advantage of the Video Codec Unit (VCU) H.265/H.264 in the Zynq MPSoC of the K26 to stream high-resolution video to it.
ApotheoTech is also launching expansion boards to go with the Aper-Oculus. The CXP Dualis FMC to support prototyping Host and Device solutions for CoaXPress up to CXP 12, and the VincuLink FMC GPIO-expansion board that allows to connections to M.2 E-Key PCIe cards, RPi HATs, and PMODs.
As I mentioned the Aper-Oculus is the only carrier for the K26 SOM that supports SLVS-EC and FMC, but a full comparison chart of how it stacks up to other carrier boards is available on its crowdfunding page.
In terms on price, the Aper-Oculus lands on the mid to upper end of the scale, but worth it in my opinion given the layout quality required for SLVS-EC. It and the expansion boards are currently available for purchase with an expected ship date of June 14th, 2024 at the time of writing.
