Electronic – Save a program into a Spartan 3AN

In terms of interfacing to the camera and clocking data in, that will be fine it can handle it. It may not handle the speeds you are interested in.

5MP * 3 (colours, RGB) * 15 (times per second) = 225*e6. (assuming 24 bit colour depth)

So that means you will need a clock speed of at least 225 MHz assuming you can move data on every clock signal, which you may not, depending on the sensor, so you may need to double this figure to circa 450-500 MHz

The Spartan you are looking at has a clock signal of 50MHz.

So the short answer is no, not at those speeds.

The other consideration you need to apply is how many logic blocks does your logic require? to work this out, write out your implementation in VHDL/verilog, simulate and then synthese. Read the outputs from the tool and it will tell you how many logic blocks you need, then select an appropriate FPGA which has 50% more logic blocks to allow for unuseable blocks due to routing constraints and gives you some room to grow.

Also you need to consider RAM or some other sort of memory and how your will store these bursts. If you are shooting at 15 fps for 1 second then you need 225 MB which is a lot or RAM for an embedded system.

After storing in RAM you will need to flush into ROM of some sort (for example compact flash).

The interface to an AC97 codec is a bit more complicated than straight digital audio. The serial data consists of 256-bit data frames; each frame contains several channels of 20-bit samples. The overall data rate is 12.288 MHz; dividing by 256 gives the sample rate of 48 kHz. Part of the 256-bit frame is dedicated to control messages, e.g. to set mixer registers. You may need to do this once after power up/reset to set the volume.

The AC97 spec is available from Intel. Writing your own master is not unreasonable but it will take some time. You may also be able to find one you can reuse. OpenCores has one. There's a very barebones AC97 controller and some general information about the protocol here.

I can't remember how many of the AC97 registers are standardized. The manual I found online for your board says it has an LM4550 codec. Assuming that's right, you may want to refer to the LM4550 datasheet for a complete list of configuration registers.