Jong-Ho PARK, Jung-Hwan KIM, Sung-Ho SUH, Jang-Kyoo SHIN^*, Minho LEE, Pyung CHOI and Tetsuya YAGI¹

School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Kyungpook National University, 1370 Sankyuk-dong, Buk-ku, Daegu 702-701, Korea
¹Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Yamadaoka 2-1, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan

(Received March 19, 2004; Accepted November 22, 2004)

We have designed and fabricated a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) vision chip by modeling cells of the human retina as hardware that are involved in edge and motion detection. There are several fluctuation factors which affect the characteristics of metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) through the CMOS fabrication process and this effect appears as the output offset of the vision chip, which is composed of pixel arrays and readout circuits. The vision chip which detects edge and motion information from an input image is used for the input stage of other systems. Therefore, the output offset of the vision chip determines the efficiency of the entire system. In order to eliminate the offset at the output stage, we designed a vision chip utilizing the correlated double sampling (CDS) technique. The chip has been fabricated using a 0.6 μm standard CMOS process. With reliable output characteristics, this chip can be used at the input stage for various applications.

Key words: retina, vision chip, CDS, edge detection, motion detection

^*E-mail address: jkshin@ee.knu.ac.kr