• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.231-240
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• 2003

The problem of power consumption and the limitation of a chip area should be considered when the pixel number of the edge detection circuit increases to fabricate a vision chip for edge detection with high resolution. The numeric increment of the unit circuit causes power consumption to increase and require a larger chip area. An increment of power consumption and a limitation of chip area with several ten milli-meters square supplied by the CMOS foundry company restrict the pixel numbers of the edge detection circuit. In this paper, we proposed a electronic switch to minimize the power consumption owing to the numeric increment of the edge detection circuit to realize a vision chip for edge detection with high resolution. We also applied a method by which photodetector and edge detection circuit are separated to implement a vision chip with a higher resolution. The photodetector circuit with $128{\times}128$ pixels uses a common edge detection circuit with $1{\times}128$ pixels so that resolution was improved at the same chip area. The chip size is $4mm{\times}4mm$ and the power consumption was confirmed to be about 20mW using SPICE.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.783-789
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• 2008

A bio-inspired vision chip for edge detection was fabricated using 0.35 ${\mu}m$ double-poly four-metal complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. It mimics the edge detection mechanism of a biological retina. This type of vision chip offer several advantages including compact size, high speed, and dense system integration. Low resolution and relatively high power consumption are common limitations of these chips because of their complex circuit structure. We have tried to overcome these problems by rearranging and simplifying their circuits. A vision chip of $160{\times}120$ pixels has been fabricated in $5{\times}5\;mm^2$ silicon die. It shows less than 10 mW of power consumption.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.188-194
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• 2004

With a remarkable advance in CMOS (complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor) process technology, a variety of vision sensors with signal processing circuits for complicated functions are actively being developed. Especially, as the principles of signal processing in human retina have been revealed, a series of vision chips imitating human retina have been reported. Human retina is able to detect the edge and motion of an object effectively. The edge detection among the several functions of the retina is accomplished by the cells called photoreceptor, horizontal cell and bipolar cell. We designed a CMOS vision chip by modeling cells of the retina as hardwares involved in edge and motion detection. The designed vision chip was fabricated using $0.6{\mu}m$ CMOS process and the characteristics were measured. Having reliable output characteristics, this chip can be used at the input stage for many applications, like targe tracking system, fingerprint recognition system, human-friendly robot system and etc.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.112-119
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• 2006

Resolution of an image sensor is very significant parameter to improve. It is hard to improve the resolution of the CMOS vision chip for edge detection based on a biological retina using a resistive network because the vision chip contains additional circuits such as a resistive network and some processing circuits comparing with general image sensors such as CMOS image sensor (CIS). In this paper, we proved the problem of low resolution by separating photo-sensing and signal processing circuits. This type of vision chips occurs a problem of low operation speed because the signal processing circuits should be commonly used in a row of the photo-sensors. The low speed problem of operation was proved by using a reset decoder. A vision chip for edge detection with $128{\times}128$ pixel array has been designed and fabricated by using $0.35{\mu}m$ 2-poly 4-metal CMOS technology. The fabricated chip was integrated with optical lens as a camera system and investigated with real image. By using this chip, we could achieved sufficient edge images for real application.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.369-372
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• 2002

In this research, a vision system for detecting tool breakage which is hardly detected by such indirect in-process measurement method as acoustic emission, cutting torque and motor current was developed and embedded into a PC-NC system. The vision system consists of CMOS image sensors, a slit beam laser generator and an image grabber board. Slit beam laser was emitted on the tool surface to separate the tool geometry well from the various obstacles surrounding the tool. An image of tool is captured through two steps of signal processing, that is, median filtering and thresholding and then the tool is estimated normal or broken by use of change of the centroid of the captured image. An air curtain made by the jetting high-pressure air in front of the lens was devised to prevent the vision system from being contaminated by scattered coolant, cutting chips in cutting process. To embed the vision system to a Siemens PC-NC controller 840D NC, an HMI(Human Machine Interface) program was developed under the Windows 95 operating system of MMC103. The developed HMI is placed in a sub window of the main window of 840D and this program can be activated or deactivated either by a soft key on the operating panel or M codes in the NC part program. As the tool breakage is detected, the HMI program emit a command for automatic tool change or send alarm to the NC kernel. Evaluation test in a high speed tapping center showed the developed system was successful in detection of the small-radius tool breakage.