A Fast and Low Power CMOS Sensor for Optical Tracking

A new CMOS optical sensor for active optical tracking is presented. The tracking function is carried out pointing the target with collimated light beam and estimating the position of the back-reflected beam portion impinging on the device. The core of the device, fabricated in standard 0.8 um CMOS technology, is an array of 20x20 pixels where mixed analogue-digital image pre-processing, at pixel and array level, followed by a digital extraction of the beam centroid position executed at row and column level. The image position can be estimated in 120us with an accuracy of 0.9um. The chip exhibits a worst case power consumption of 15mW@5V and 3000frames/