Image pickup system and endoscope system

Abstract

An image pickup system includes an image pickup unit having a solid-state image pickup device, for example, CMOS. A processor controls the image pickup device and receives an image signal from the image pickup unit with a signal line in serial transmission. The processor includes a clock and data recovery circuit for deriving a clock signal from the image signal input by the signal line, and for producing a data signal synchronized with the clock signal in phase synchronization. There is a signal processing unit for signal processing according to the data signal and the clock signal produced by the clock and data recovery circuit. Preferably, the image pickup unit includes an A/D converter for digitally converting the image signal from the image pickup device into parallel data of bits of a predetermined number.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.