An integrated bit-serial 9-point median chip

An integrated 9-point median chip is designed and fabricated. The median operation is based on a recently proposed bit-serial searching algorithm. A standard 3μ double metal technology has been used. The main features of the chip are small size and relative high speed. It works up to 50MHz clock rate with chip size of only 1.15 mm². A comparison is made between different VLSI architectures for the implementation of median filters. It turns out that the median filter based the proposed method is suitable for applications where many small median filters needed to be implemented on a single chip or applications where the window size is large