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Architectural and Basic Circuit Considerations for a Flexible 128 × 128 Mixed-Signal SIMD Vision Chip

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Abstract

From a system level perspective, this paper presents a 128 × 128 flexible and reconfigurable Focal-Plane Analog Programmable Array Processor, which has been designed as a single chip in a 0.35 μm standard digital 1P-5M CMOS technology. The core processing array has been designed to achieve high-speed of operation and large-enough accuracy (∼7 bits) with low power consumption. The chip includes on-chip program memory to allow for the execution of complex, sequential and/or bifurcation flow image processing algorithms. It also includes the structures and circuits needed to guarantee its embedding into conventional digital hosting systems: external data interchange and control are completely digital. The chip contains close to four million transistors, 90% of them working in analog mode. The chip features up to 330 GOPs (Giga Operations per second), and uses the power supply (180 GOP/Joule) and the silicon area (3.8 GOPS/mm2) efficiently, and is able to maintain VGA processing throughputs of 100 Frames/s with about 10–20 basic image processing tasks on each frame.

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Liñán, G., Espejo, S., Domínguez-Castro, R. et al. Architectural and Basic Circuit Considerations for a Flexible 128 × 128 Mixed-Signal SIMD Vision Chip. Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing 33, 179–190 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021272100265

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