Vivo Customized V1 Chip And Other Technologies
In today’s afternoon, Vivo held an imaging technology sharing session on the theme of “Image of the Core” to get a glimpse of the X70 series‘ imaging capabilities before the X70 series launch.
At a time when the concept of computational photography is becoming more and more important, Vivo has deeply cooperated with cell phone SoC manufacturers to drive mobile imaging progress with hardware, bringing the customized V1 chip, a professional imaging chip that serves high-speed computational imaging.
In the overall imaging system design, V1 can be paired with different main chips and displays to expand the high-speed imaging computing power of ISP and release the ISP load of the main chip, while serving the user’s needs for both photo and video recording, making it compatible with both.
Vivo said that the complete project took 24 months to develop, with more than 300 R&D team members, and the V1 chip itself has the characteristics of high computing power, low latency, and low power consumption. On top of the powerful imaging capability of the main chip ISP, the imaging algorithm inside the V1 is superimposed on the professional imaging chip, which reduces the power consumption of the hardware circuit by 50% compared to the software implementation when processing the same amount of computing tasks at high speed.
Thanks to this, Vivo phones with V1 chips can see the bright preview effect in the viewfinder when shooting night scenes, without waiting for the long shutter overlay after pressing the shutter to achieve a real-time preview. Vivo believes that the professional imaging chip V1 chip will open the next era of the cell phone imaging industry – the era of hardware-level algorithms.
Vivo customized V1 Chip Introduction
The emergence of super wide-angle and periscope zoom has broken through people’s imagination of cell phone photography optics time and again. When facing complex light, dark light scenes, extreme night scenes, and many video shooting scenes, the image arithmetic and chip power consumption of cell phones needs to be further upgraded and evolved.
As a fully customized special specification integrated chip, the professional image chip V1 collaborates with the main chip to achieve both effect experience and compatibility and has the characteristics of high arithmetic power, low latency, and low power consumption.
Under the established business, V1 can both process complex operations at high speed like CPU and complete parallel processing of data like GPU and DSP. Facing a large number of complex operations, V1 has exponential improvement in energy efficiency ratio compared to DSP and CPU.
To maximize its simultaneous processing capability, Vivo optimizes the data storage architecture and high-speed read/write circuitry inside the chip to achieve a large cache equivalent to 32MB with full on-chip storage.
In addition, on top of the powerful imaging capability of the main chip ISP, the overlay of professional imaging chip V1 within the computational imaging algorithm, when processing the same amount of computational tasks at high speed, the dedicated algorithm of V1 reduces the power consumption of the hardware circuit by 50% compared to the software implementation.
Thanks to V1’s high-speed data processing, night scenes can be previewed in real-time. The debut of professional image chip V1 is the first step of Vivo’s chip strategy. In the future, Vivo will conduct more comprehensive exploration in the chip field, expand for specific scenes, and finally achieve the goal of all scenes.
Ultra-low dispersion and high transmission glass lenses break through the ceiling of cell phone optical devices.
Constrained by the space limitation, it is more difficult to achieve a further leap in cell phone photography and do the upgrade of the lens. This time, Vivo and Zeiss’s team went through many rounds of verification, and finally achieved a high specification glass lens on the cell phone to achieve high light transmission, ultra-low dispersion, and strong thermal stability. It greatly reduces the appearance of glare ghosting during night photography.
Compared with plastic lenses, glass lenses have the natural advantage of low dispersion. Vivo’s ultra-low dispersion high-transparency glass lenses further reduce dispersion and achieve the industry’s highest score of 81.6 on the number, the authoritative indicator of dispersion ability, effectively solving the problems of purple edge and pseudo-color in high-contrast scenes.
The ultra-low dispersion high-transmittance glass lens also achieves higher purity, and the central transmittance is increased to a maximum of 95%. AOA dynamic optical calibration process is used to adjust the lens thickness error and lens eccentricity error caused by the reduction of sharpness, to ensure the optical quality of the final lens.
Multi-coating to suppress glare ghosting and set high industry standards together with Zeiss
Since its inception, Zeiss T* coating has been the masterpiece of Zeiss and a powerful guarantee of high image quality. Thanks to this, Vivo Zeiss has joined hands to apply the advanced coating technology in cell phone lenses.
Facing the traditional problems in the industry such as glare and ghosting, Vivo innovatively introduced SWC coating technology. Based on the principle of bionics, it fully suppresses reflected light and reduces the reflection rate to as low as 0.1%, significantly improving the purity. In addition, Vivo exclusively debuted the ALD atomic layer deposition process, which forms a nano-level coating on the ultra-transparent glass lens to further reduce light reflection.
The problem of petal ghost shadow is also a shadow that cannot be shaken off by cell phone photography. Vivo adopts pigment spin coating technology in the lens to solve the adhesion problem between pigment and blue glass, the coating thickness is as thin as 2um, and after more than 10 times different processes, parameters debugging, mass production is finally realized.
Faithful restoration of what the human eye sees, interpretation of Zeiss natural color
“Professional creators prefer to faithfully restore the natural colors seen by the human eye”. For this reason, Vivo and Zeiss have discussed in-depth to develop the concept of WYSIWYG true color, through 140 color card performance and the introduction of 3D color mapping matrix algorithm tuning 262144 parameters, so that the hue is further accurate, saturation processing finer, and finally make the photo hue accuracy ΔE improved by about 15.5%, leading the industry to bring Zeiss natural color.
Vivo and Zeiss continue to research, develop and tune the portrait mode with built-in Zeiss lens style, deeply restoring Zeiss’s classic Biotar and Sonnar lens effects, bringing Zeiss quality portraits and empowering the public to create.
The long track of Vivo’s image is firm so that everyone can enjoy the fun of creation.
Vivo regards technology development on imaging as a systematic technical project. Through the collaboration of platform, device, algorithm, and other aspects, the final imaging quality is improved.
Vivo hopes to bring users a borderless experience of scenes, people, and images through continuous humanistic thinking and technical exploration of cell phone images. In other words, no limits are set for scenes, so that people can take pictures whenever and wherever they want; no limits are set for people so that everyone can take better pictures; no limits are set for images so that the expression of cell phone images is more powerful and direct to people’s hearts.
The professional image flagship Vivo X70 series will be officially unveiled at 19:30 on September 9. The first flagship new product equipped with professional image chip V1 will officially arrive at that time, and we invite you to stay tuned.
