VLSI implementation of electronics module of a thermal imaging system
Thermal Imaging has been an area of potential military interest in the last three decades and has been shrouded by veil of secrecy. Recently there has been resurgence of the interest in thermal imaging due to its use in non-military applications such as biomedical engineering, conservation of natural resources, astronomy etc., and list of such applications is growing day by day. Major hurdle in putting this technology for commercial applications has been prohibitive cost of equipment. In this paper we present a methodology for designing and implementing the controller for a thermal imaging system from the hardware description languages (HDLs) such as Verilog and VHDL. We have designed and implemented the digital timing and control signal generation module of thermal imaging system in Xilinx FPGA. This approach has given the system much needed reconfigurability to suit the customer's requirement and resulted in reduction of the concept to market time.