Progress in VLSI optical position-sensitive circuits

This paper describes new techniques to implement 1-D and 2-D mesh-type position-sensitive devices (PSDs) using current-mode analog VLSI (very large scale integration). By taking advantage of local analog computation, this approach allows sensors to be merged on the same chip with extremely compact circuits that process the incoming signal. The presented schemes have advantages over conventional implementations in using general-purpose technology and in their capability to be electronically tunable, Three versions of the sensor have been implemented and tested, showing non-linearity r.m.s. errors ranging from 0.1 to 1.2% depending on the architecture