An FPGA-based versatile development system for endoscopic capsule design optimization

This work presents a development system, based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), that was specifically designed for testing the entire electronics to be integrated in an endoscopic capsule, such as a camera, an image compression engine, a high-speed telemetric system, illumination and inertial sensors. Thanks to its high flexibility, several features were tested and evaluated, thus allowing to find the optimal configuration, in terms of power consumption, performances and size, to be fit in a capsule. As final result, an average frame rate of 19 frame per second (fps) over a transmission channel of 1.5 Mbit/s was chosen as the best choice for the development of a miniaturized endoscopic capsule prototype.