This paper presents a high-speed column-parallel cyclic analog-to-digital converter（ADC） for a CMOS image sensor.A correlated double sampling（CDS） circuit is integrated in the ADC,which avoids a stand-alone CDS circuit block.An offset cancellation technique is also introduced,which reduces the column fixed-pattern noise（FPN） effectively.One single channel ADC with an area less than 0.02 mm^2 was implemented in a 0.13μm CMOS image sensor process.The resolution of the proposed ADC is 10-bit,and the conversion rate is 1.6 MS/s. The measured differential nonlinearity and integral nonlinearity are 0.89 LSB and 6.2 LSB together with CDS, respectively.The power consumption from 3.3 V supply is only 0.66 mW.An array of 48 10-bit column-parallel cyclic ADCs was integrated into an array of CMOS image sensor pixels.The measured results indicated that the ADC circuit is suitable for high-speed CMOS image sensors.
This paper presents a novel compact memory in the processing element （PE） for single-instruction multiple-data （SIMD） vision chips. The PE memory is constructed with 8×8 register cells, where one latch in the slave stage is shared by eight latches in the master stage. The memory supports simultaneous read and write on the same address in one clock cycle. Its compact area of 14.33 μm^2/bit promises a higher integration level of the processor. A prototype chip with a 64×64 PE array is fabricated in a UMC 0.18 μm CMOS technology. Five types of the PE memory cell structure are designed and compared. The testing results demonstrate that the proposed PE memory architecture well satisfies the requirement of the vision chip in high-speed real-time vision applications, such as 1000 fps edge extraction.
