Hydrogen Flame Detector with Bioinspired Optoelectronic Integrated Circuit and Field-Programmable Gate Array Using Integrated Three-Dimensional System Architecture

Abstract

We introduce an integration concept between a bioinspired optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to realize a single-chip smart ultraviolet (UV) imaging sensor. The bioinspired OEIC stacks the Pt/n-Al 0.49 Ga 0.51 N backside-illuminated (BSI) Schottky barrier diode (SBD) photodiode array onto the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) edge detection circuits (EDCs). The EDC mimics the outer vertebrate retina that has the purpose of reducing the digital analysis information by extracting the edge from the detected object before being processed by the FPGA, and thus decreasing the power consumption. The binary images produced by the bioinspired OEIC are analyzed in the FPGA using a histogram projection circuit to generate information about the location, size, moving speed, moving direction, and spreading status of the detected object, which is the UV radiation coming from the hydrogen flames. In this study, an EDC chip of 1 × 16 pixels was fabricated and integrated with the FPGA using wires. We evaluated the speed calculation performance of the system with a moving object in the range of 1.7-2,049 pixels/s.