Design of a current mode polarization arithmetic analyzer

CMOS Polarization image sensors can detect the polarization of an incident light, from which a lot of information can be derived about the properties and shape of the images objects. This paper proposes a current mode polarization analyzer, based on a three-parameter polarization analysis methodology. The procedure of the calculation of the intensity, polarization degree, and the polarization angle is optimized in a format for hardware friendly implementation. The proposed analysis procedure is implemented using only absolute adder/subtractors and multiplier/dividers. In this work, the multiplier/divider is performed in two modes: i) geometric mean calculation mode, and ii) square/divider mode. Both a parallel implementation, which employs five multiplier/divider, for the optimization of processing efficiency, and a serial implementation, which employs two multiplier/divider, for the optimization of power efficiency, are designed and compared. A prototype chip of the proposed design was implemented in 0.5μm 3M2P standard CMOS technology, occupying a silicon area of 150 × 140 μm².