Topics on CMOS Image Sensors

Today there exist several applications where a real visible scene needs to be sampled to electrical signals, e.g., video cameras, digital still cameras, and machine vision systems. Since the 1970’s charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors have primarily been used for this task, but during the last decade CMOS image sensors have become more and more popular. The demand for image sensors has lately grown very rapidly due to the increased market for, e.g., digital still cameras and the integration of image sensors in mobile phones. The first out of three included papers presents a programmable multiresolution machine vision sensor with on-chip image processing capabilities. The sensor comprises an innovative multiresolution sensing area, 1536 A/D converters, and a SIMD array of 1536 bit-serial processors with corresponding memory. The SIMD processor array can deliver more than 100 GOPS sustained and the onchip pixel-analyzing rate can be as high as 4 Gpixels/s. The sensor is intended for high-speed multisense imaging where, e.g., color, greyscale, internal materia