Camera Link - Bit Assignments

Bit Assignments

The bits of pixel values are not assigned to serial transmitters in order, but are permutated in a complicated way, as shown in the following very busy figure:

The upper half of this figure is only relevant for the Medium and Full configurations which require two physical interfaces and two cables. The two rectangles in the middle represent the cables, with the connector pins of each signal printed at either side.

To the left of the transceivers, the list of pixel data bits transmitted over that Channel Link is printed, from LSB to MSB. The characters L, F and D refer to the Line Sync, Frame Sync and Data Valid bits, respectively. The underscore represents an unused spare bit. It remains to be said how pixel data bits are assigned to the bits 0 to 71 used in the figure. For grey-scale pixels, this is a trivial one-to-one mapping; for colour pixels with a multiple of 8 bits per colour, the colours are simply concatenated in the order red, green and blue (from LSB to MSB). For 12-bit RGB data, the lower 8 bits of each colour are assigned to data bits 0-7,16-23,32-39; the higher 4 bits of each colour to bits 8-11,12-15,40-43.