A built-in method of on-chip solar battery in a CMOS LSI is proposed. The proposed solar battery can be formed using conventional CMOS process technology. It can generate a high voltage of 0.6-0.83 V by a series connection structure of two types of p-n junction diodes formed with the CMOS circuit simultaneously on the LSI chip. The generated voltage is sufficient to drive the conventional CMOS circuit without modification. The test chip was produced experimentally using conventional 0.35 µm CMOS technology, and the drive performance of the on-chip solar battery was evaluated. The conversion efficiency of the proposed solar battery was 2.6%. The area of the solar battery required for power consumption was 6.1 mm 2 /µW in the case of the 2000lx illumination.
We developed a three-dimensional (3D) binocular range sensor LSI with an enhanced correlation signal. The developed LSI chip was produced using a process of 0.35 µm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) 1-poly 3-metal and has a die size of 4.20×3.33 mm2. The chip uses a 3.0 V supply voltage and has a power consumption of 280 mW at a clock frequency of 10 MHz. Two image sensors and the circuits for binocular stereo vision are integrated into the sensor. The distance to an object is determined by calculating the correlation between the two photosensors' output differential signals and observing the position of strong correlated values. However, in the previously developed range sensor, the correlation was weak when there was a small differential signal and it was unable to simultaneously detect several objects. In the newly developed range sensor, a circuit that modulates the differential signal was integrated and the correlation process was enhanced. The object detection signals are ten times larger than those of the previous sensor. As a result, we were able to simultaneously detect the 3D position of several objects. All the necessary calculations for 3D detection take 32 µs per frame. However, the output time for one 3D frame is 26 ms. Thus, the frame rate is limited to 38 frames per second.
We have proposed a simple method for color imaging in which the photosensor is illuminated from the side. In this method, color imaging can be produced using single pixels and without generating false colors and moiré patterns. A 5.0 ×5.0 mm2 test chip was fabricated using a 0.35 µm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) 1-poly 4-metal process. Because the side illumination method is used, the side of the test chip was etched using a high-speed deep reactive ion etching (D-RIE) process. Light illumination experiments confirmed that four colors – blue, green, red, and near-infrared – could be separated using this method. We also estimated the color separation properties of a similar sensor based on a 0.18 µm CMOS process.
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