
Prel i m nary -4- November 1997
W9966CF/TF
Video Camera Interface Controller with Compression
1 General Description
The W9966CF/TF is an interface chip offered by Winbond to facilitate adapterless connection
between video camera and personal computer ,via the industrial IEEE P1284 compatibile parallel
port. It, along with advanced compression technlogy, provides high performance solution for video
and still image capturing, video e-mail and video conferencing applications.
The W9966CF/TF eliminates the need of traditional capture cards by using the popular
SPP/EPP/ECP parallel port for video data transfer to host computers and thus reduce the cost of the
video input subsystem while making it easier for users to set up. To cope with the still-limited
bandwidth of the parallel port, the W9966CF/TF employs advanced programmable compression
technology to reduce the amount of data transferred, and supports a wide range of video quality as
required by different application areas. A host-residing software program will decode the compressed
video and present it in industrial standard formats (e.g. VFW) to the applications.
The W9966CF/TF provides wide-ranging application-programmable video resolutions and
compression ratios. For POTS-based video conferencing application, where the host processor is
usually used as the H-protocols CODEC, the mode of QCIF (176x144) resolution with no compression
is recommended to save the host processor power from video recovering calculation. For high
quality video capturing with high resolution and high frame rate for non-realtime applications such as
video e-mail and video editing, the mode of CIF (352x288) with high compression ratio can be used.
For high quality snapshot image capturing, modes from QCIF to VGA resolution (640x480) with no
compression can be used.
The W9966CF/TF adapts to a variety of CCD modules. It provides a serial bus and general I/O ports
as control interface for different CCD chipsets. The input format can be 16-bit YUV 4:2:2 data, or 8-bit
digitized CCD raw data from the CCD sensor, which most CCD DSP modules are supporting.