US Patent 7821658 Interleaving imaging device controller with multi-use circuitry

An imaging device with an improved controller is disclosed wherein the controller eliminates duplicated circuitry and provides multiuser circuitry that efficiently replaces multiple dedicated circuit blocks. In one aspect, duplicated same-function circuit blocks are replaced with a switch controlled by an alignment control signal to operate as a multiplexer or demultiplexer. In another aspect, multiple different-function circuit blocks which generally have no temporal overlap of their active operation are replaced with a programmable logic device that is reconfigured dynamically to perform some subset of the different functions on an as-needed basis.