A Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Vision Chip for Edge and Motion Detection with a Function for Output Offset Cancellation

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 m standard CMOS process. With reliable output characteristics, this chip can be used at the input stage for various applications. © 2005 The Optical Society of Japan