A new structure of the 2-D silicon retina

Author

Wu, Chung-Yu ; Chiu, Chin-Fong

Author_Institution

Inst. of Electron., Nat. Chiao Tung Univ., Hsinchu, Taiwan

Volume

30

Issue

8

fYear

1995

fDate

8/1/1995 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

890

Lastpage

897

Abstract

A new silicon retina is proposed to realize the functions of the vertebrate retina. In the proposed silicon retina, each basic cell consists of two separated bipolar phototransistors only. The smooth function of the horizontal cell in the vertebrate retina is efficiently achieved by the diffusion and redistribution of the photogenerated excess carriers in the common base region of the phototransistors. Thus, the structure of the new silicon retina is very simple and compact. It can be easily implemented in both CMOS and BiCMOS technologies with a small chip area. A 2-D array of 32*32 new silicon retina cells has been designed and fabricated in 0.8 μm N-well CMOS process. Experimental results show that the new silicon retina is capable of extracting the edge of the image and detecting the moving object

Keywords

computer vision; edge detection; image sensors; motion estimation; object detection; phototransistors; silicon; 0.8 micron; 2D array; BiCMOS technology; CMOS technology; N-well CMOS process; Si; bipolar phototransistors; digital image processing; edge extraction; image sensors; moving object detection; silicon retina cells; vertebrate retina; BiCMOS integrated circuits; CMOS process; CMOS technology; Digital images; Image edge detection; Image processing; Object detection; Phototransistors; Retina; Silicon;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9200

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/4.400431

Filename

400431