Vision Perception Unit: Next-Generation Smart CMOS Image Sensor

As we reach the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling, it has become highly desirable to design a highly integrated and optimized pipeline specifically for computer vision. A new generation of integrated "smart" visual processors that streamline an end-to-end optimized visual information acquisition and processing pipeline (VIAPP) becomes necessary to lower the cost, power consumption, and latency.We describe a new paradigm for VIAPP as Vision Perception Unit (VPU), wherein electric signals generated by photons are amplified before converting to the digital signals to emulate an initial layer of a convolutional neural network (CNN). The outputs from these layers are then converted to digital signals and processed by following layers of a deep CNN.