A Two-Step Processing in CMOS Image Sensor Architecture

The Processing-in-Sensor (PIS) architecture, which shifts computing capabilities to the sensing end, is proposed to address the communication bottleneck encountered when transmitting data from CMOS image sensors to terminal hosts. Existing solutions often suffer from high structural complexity and insufficient computing speeds, negatively impacting overall performance. In this work, we introduce a PIS architecture that employs Two-Step Computing technology to streamline circuit design, thereby accelerating the sensing-computing process. The simplified architecture also results in significant reductions in power consumption, leading to enhanced computational efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed architecture achieves an efficiency of 4.29 TOPS/W at 60 fps. Furthermore, we conducted an object detection task using the proposed PIS with a computer terminal, attaining a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.42, thus highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.