In the blink of a silicon eye

In this article, a new device structure called the neuron-bipolar junction transistor (/spl nu/BJT) was presented. It has been successfully applied to the design of a silicon retina and large-neighborhood cellular neural networks (CNNs). The /spl nu/BJT-based smoothing array for the silicon retina has a simple and compact structure, which is suitable for the VLSI implementation. It can be integrated with other CMOS retinal signal processing circuits to form smart sensor systems.