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Image Sensor with Embedded Processing in 3-D Technology

Biologically inspired sensors have traditionally been implemented in standard CMOS technologies. Vision has been one of the most active bio-inspired researched areas, and various systems-on-a-chip have been created. One of the main shortcomings in these systems is mapping biological functions, which are constructed in the 3D world, onto a planar 2D Si structure. For example, a silicon retina models the spatiotemporal processing of the five different layers of cells in the human retina.  The penalty of mapping the functionality of these 3D cell layers onto a 2D integrated circuit is extremely large photo pixels.  One can envision, that a more suitable approach would include direct one-to-one mapping of biological layers into stacked silicon circuits.  Recent advancements in 3D integration of silicon dies allow such implementation in more elegant manner.

An overview of the image sensor is pressented in Figure 1:

References:

[1] V. Gruev, R. Philipp, J. Van der Spiegel and R. Etienne-Cummings, "Image Sensor with General Spatial Processing in a 3D Integrated Circuit Technology," Proc. IEEE ISCAS, Kos, Greece, May 2006. (Upenn, IEEExplore)