Keiichiro KAGAWA^*, Hiroaki ASAZU¹, Masahiro NUNOSHITA¹, and Jun OHTA¹

Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, 2-1 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan
¹Graduate School of Materials Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5 Takayama, Ikoma, Nara 630-0101, Japan

(Received March 28, 2007; Accepted November 27, 2007)

We present a vision chip architecture with column-level photo-amplification of optical data signals for optical wireless local area networks (LANs) to reduce the pixel area. Based on the architecture, we have fabricated a prototype vision chip in a standard 0.8 μm bipolar complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology. The device offers position detection of other optical transceivers in the LAN and 4-ch concurrent high-speed optical data acquisition. A data rate of 400 Mbps was demonstrated. The pixel size was 125 μm square, which can be shrunk to smaller than around 60 μm square in 0.35 μm or more advanced BiCMOS or CMOS technologies.

Key words: vision chip, optical wireless LAN, free-space optical communication

^*E-mail address: kagawa@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp