Reconfigurable Hardware for Power-over-Fiber Applications

In this paper we present an optically powered and motorized video camera system. Energy for the camera sensor is supplied by a glass fiber carrying 800 mW of optical power, which the sensor converts back to 320 mW of electrical power. The specific advantage of this arrangement is galvanic isolation and a very high robustness with respect to electromagnetic interference. We demonstrate that sufficient energy can be transmitted for driving an Actel Igloo FPGA, which performs the necessary signal processing. Additionally, with the help of capacitive energy storage, some small actuators can be supplied which move the camera sensor head. The base station of the system, based on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, holds a LEON-3 based system-on-chip encoding the incoming VGA video stream into Motion-JPEG formatted data in realtime, which may be directly sent to the internet using an Ethernet interface. The prototype has numerous fields of application where it performs much better than stateof-the-art solutions. Most prominent examples are visual sensors in high voltage areas as well as medical endoscopes.