About the adjective `neural´, when applied to smart sensors

The design of a compact and parallel cellular array featuring minimal-size Boolean processors as with optoelectronic devices and nonstandard A/D (analog/digital) converters is discussed. This human-size vision machine is called Retina, which is to be integrated on a single monolithic CMOS circuit. It is shown that the rapprochement between acquisition and processing is particularly suited for the emergence of unique kinds of interactions between analog and digital computations. The immediate interest of analog neural computations for the nonstandard A/D conversion implied by the Retina structure is emphasized. The optimality of the corresponding process is shown. However, the authors claim that, within smart sensors, pattern recognition is better carried out by an iterative Boolean computational scheme