- The works of Carver Mead's group in California Institute of
Technology, starting with Lyon's optical mouse designed in 1980(See
section 3.2), are major contributions to this exotic and
fascinating area of VLSI design. The idea of neuromorphic
engineering using VLSI technologies was first introduced by Carver
Mead and bloomed into several analog VLSI chips appearing in ``the
Bible of analog VLSI'', Analog VLSI and Neural Systems
published by Addison-Wesley in 1989 [Mead 89b]. This work is
still continuing in the Carver-Lab in Caltech. The research
emphasis in this group is on analog VLSI systems. In the past they
have designed many chips using analog VLSI based on biological
models of vision, cochlea, and other neural systems.
Carver-Lab Analog VLSI Group
in Caltech Home page
- Koch-Lab again in Caltech, led by Christoph Koch, has
focused on modeling biological neural systems and also implementing
them in analog VLSI.
Research in the laboratory of Professor Christof Koch focuses on
several areas:
- Biophysics of Computation in Single Neurons
- Cortical Circuits Underlying Motion and Visual Attention
- Psychophysics of Attention and Awareness
- The Neuronal Correlate of Visual Awareness and Consciousness
- Neuromorphic Analog VLSI Vision Systems
Koch-Lab Analog VLSI Group
in Caltech Home page
- Analog VLSI group in Johns Hopkins University led by Professor
Andreas Andreou has had similar interests in analog VLSI systems as
the Carver-Lab. Analog VLSI chips mainly based on biological models
have been designed in this lab. Some system designs in this lab
include analog VLSI models of auditory processing, early vision and
silicon retinas, associative memory, adaptive neural networks, and
speech recognition.
Analog VLSI Group in Johns
Hopkins University
- The VLSI group at Laval University is led by Marc Tremblay. The
research is principally inspired by computational needs in computer
vision. The VLSI projects are focused on the design and development
of smart sensors. Some of the research topics include the
MAR-Camera systems, motion detection, and linear arrays for 3-D
cameras.
Vision
Sensor Group at the University of Laval, Canada.
- The Image Processing Group at Linkoping University in Sweden has
been developing vision cameras with processing capabilities. The
group led by Andres Astrom has developed the commercially available
LAPP and MAPP series cameras.
Smart Vision Sensor Group at the University of Linkoping, Sweden.
- Adelaide Uni. in Australia has been pursuing the insect vision
based motion detector project since 1991. Inspired by the simplicity
of the insect visual system, and using a VLSI friendly model for
insect vision, the first insect vision chip was designed in 1992.
The project led by Abdesselam Bouzerdoum and Kamran Eshraghian is
having a rapid growth in number of people and aspects of the design.
The work is being funded by strong industrial partners and the
federal government of Australia.
Insect Vision Group at Adelaide University
- IMEC and IBIDEM consortium, involving several universities in
Spain and Italy, have focused on the design of space variant
sensors, more specifically the "foveated sensors". The log-polar
mapping performed by these sensors is very attractive for
applications requiring rotation and scale invariant processing.
A
home page in DECV regarding the smart vision sensors
IMEC home page with links to the FUGA
foveated sensor family
LIRA Lab home page
including links to the foveated sensor
- A research group in MIT has concentrated on the implementation
of early visual processing using CCD and CMOS technologies. In this
set of projects they have targeted vision tasks and algorithms
requiring low precision. The reason in selecting CCD as the base
technology for the implementation has been stated to be the
achievable compact size.
Some of the chips designed as a part of this project include
Short description about projects going on at MIT Integrated Circuits
project, including various vision chips projects.
- The Perception System Lab. in ETCA, France is lead by Thierry
Bernard. Activiies in the lab are concentrated on various aspects of
designing intelligent systems, including vision chips, and in particular
programmable artificial retinas.
Perception Systems Group in ETCA.
- The VLSI Systems group in Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale is working on VLSI design of vision chips for real-time
dynamic tasks encountered in manufacturing and assembly,
auto-navigation, and un-manned vehicles and robotics.
VLSI Systems Group in Southern Illinois Uni.
- The Hatori-Aizawa Lab. in Tokyo University, has focused on
compression sensors and adaptive imagers for on-chip compression and
adaptation.
Hatori-Aizawa Lab.
- The VLSI group in Technion, Israel, headed by Ran Ginosar has
been developing adaptive sensitivity smart imagers, and techniques
for improving the scanning of imagers.
VLSI group at
Technion.
- A group in Mitsubishi Electric has been developing optical
neurochips using exotic III-V compound structures. The main focus of
the research has been on optical interconnection and neural network
architectures.
Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab.'s home page.
- The ``SYNERGY'' Lab. in Arizona State University led by Lex
Akers has concentrated on designing vision chips and adaptive smart
sensors ``camera on chip''.
SYNERGY lab in Arizona
State Uni.
- A group at EPFL, in Switzerland and led by Erric Vittoz are
working on analog VLSI systems. They have designed several vision
chips. Due to agreements with industrial partners the works remain
unreported to public.
Very
brief home page at EPFL
- The VLSI group at the University of Sevilla in Spain which is
associated with ``National Centre of Microelectronics'' , has been
developing vision chips based on cellular neural networks (CNN).
The ``Centro Nacional de
Microelectronica''
- The Analog Computation Group in University of Florida is headed
by John Harris. The work in this group includes analog VLSI circuits
for sensory processing, neural networks, and neurobiological models.
The Analog
Computation Group in Florida University
