CMOS Neuromorphic Optical Sensor Chip With Color Change-Intensity Change Disambiguation (CCICD)

In this paper, we propose a novel terrestrial retina-like neuromorphic sensor chip which can (1) perform irradiance and color detection via two pathways simultaneously and (2) can perform color change-intensity change disambiguation (CCICD). The irradiance detection pathway has a wide-dynamic detection range, spanning 3 orders of magnitude, and is robust to background light variations. The color detection pathway has a buried double junction photodiode as the photoreceptor followed by two parallel logarithmic I-V convertors whose outputs go to a differential amplifier. The output from this pathway is a color response which has roughly 50 nm resolution for wavelengths from 400 to 700 nm, and 22 nm resolution between 700-900 nm. With these two pathways, we can perform CCICD to determine if a change in the output of the irradiance pathway is because of irradiance change, color change, or both. This terrestrial retina-like neuromorphic sensor chip is implemented in AMI 1.5 mum technology, a standard CMOS fabrication process available at MOSIS.