Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

10-31-1990

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering - (M.S.)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Walter F. Kosonocky

Second Advisor

Durgamadhab Misra

Third Advisor

Wei Chen

Fourth Advisor

Kenneth Sohn

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and layout of a 512 x 512-element with 20μm x 20μm pixels image sensor that emulates the properties of the human eye and is useful in high speed processing of visual data for machine vision applications. The imager will be able to operate with random-address selection in variable resolution or with multiple regions of interest to reduce the number of pixels readout. The selection of the pixels is done by x-y addressing the MOS switches which connect the photodiode pixel to the output through the sense lines. The design of column decoder and row decoder has been done to incorporate the variable resolution (upto 8 pixels) requirement achieving a maximum readout rate of 1920 frames/sec. The simulation of the 512 output decoders and resetting of the sense has been done in SPICE for the operating frequency, 10MHz. A fill factor of 59% has been obtained in the pixel layout. The total chip occupied an area of about 121mm2. The video output is taken from an on-chip amplifier which is further processed by an off-chip correlated double sampling circuit. The estimated dynamic range of the sensor is 80dB with 200-300 noise electrons. The imager can find many applications in industrial machine vision tasks such as verification of the components on printed circuit boards, inspection of bottles in filling lines, and search and tracking operations in military applications.

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