• 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.