Developments in 'smart' custom VLSI sensing for industrial automata

Visual guidance of robots for assembly tasks is the 'Cinderella' of industrial machine vision applications, lagging far behind automated visual inspection, gauging and part recognition/orientation in achieving its potential within the industrial scene. A prototype binary edge-extracting ('smart') custom image sensor array, 'Edge1', was developed previously at the University of Brighton. It featured a 32*32 array with a unique unit cell architecture, featuring a diode photo-site, and associated processing circuitry capable of performing binary edge detection within the focal plane of the sensor. It was implemented in a 2 micron ES2 CMOS process and featured 72 I/O pins because of its total lack of on-chip support circuitry. Thus, although the total die area was only 6.65 square mm, it required an 84 pin grid array package of around 26 mm square. A number of detail changes were suggested by testing this prototype and many of these have been tested in a 1.5 micron ES2 CMOS reimplementation of this design, 'Edge 2'. Implemented in 1 micron ES2 CMOS it features a resolution of 64*64, as this is considered to be the optimum compromise between useful spatial resolution, speed and simplicity of data transfer and postsensor processing.<
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