Single-chip eye tracker using smart CMOS image sensor pixels

An eye tracker is a system that detects the point where the user gazes on. The conventional eye tracker using a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera needs many peripherals, software computation causing high cost, computation time and power consumption. This paper proposes a single-chip eye tracker using smart CMOS image sensor (CIS) pixels. The proposed eye tracker does not require additional peripherals and operates at higher speed than the conventional approach. The prototype chip was designed and fabricated for a 32×32 smart CIS pixels array with a 0.35-μm CMOS process. The test results show ± 1 pixel error at the rate of 125 frame-per-second. The power consumption is 260 mW with 3.3 V supply voltage and the silicon area is 3.8 mm².