Configurable 3D‐integrated focal‐plane cellular sensor–processor array architecture

Abstract

SUMMARYMixed-signal cellular visual microprocessor architecture with digital processors is described. An Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementation is also demonstrated. The architecture is composed of a regular sensor readout circuit array, prepared for 3D face-to-face-type integration, and one or several cascaded array of mainly identical (single instruction multiple data, SIMD) processing elements. The individual array elements were derived from the same general Hardware Description Language (HDL) description and could be of different sizes, aspect ratio, and computing resources.

Towards the Optimal Hardware Architecture for Computer Vision

“…Each processor, very simple, can also include an image sensor to eliminate the IO bottleneck. Some representative examples are (Foldesy et al, 2008;Garrido et al, 2008;Lopich & Dudek, 2008). There are also approaches closer to the biological vision, as (Koyanagi et al, 2001) or (Constandinou et al, 2004).…”

2D operators on topographic and non‐topographic architectures—implementation, efficiency analysis, and architecture selection methodology

“…As can be seen in Figure 3, Xenon chip [25] is constructed of an 8×8, locally interconnected cell arrangement. Each cell contains a sub-array of 8×8 photosensors; an analog multiplexer; an 8 bit AD converter; an 8 bit processor with 512 bytes of memory; and a communication unit of local and global connections.…”

“…Pipe-line architecture (CASTLE [24][23], Falcon [16], C-MVA [21]) 3. Coarse-grain cellular parallel architecture (Xenon [25]); 4. Fine-grain fully parallel cellular architecture with discrete time processing (SCAMP [15], Q-Eye [19]); 5.…”

VISCUBE: A Multi-Layer Vision Chip

“…This 8x8 digital processor array ( Fig. 8) is an advanced version of our previous deign [16]. The distinguishing feature of this new implementation is the increased memory size and higher flexibility in the processed window size and distribution.…”