An 80×60 range image sensor based on 10µm 50MHz lock-in pixels in 0.18µm CMOS

Because we are living in a three-dimensional world, the usual intensity map provided by standard digital cameras is often not sufficient to build the sophisticated models required by systems capable of analyzing and interpreting their environment. A three-dimensional (3D) image sensor has great potential for improvement in many areas like ambient-assisted living, virtual reality, gaming, security and surveillance, etc., because it significantly increases the robustness of object classification and avoids time-consuming post-processing steps. Although the first commercial products are now available on the market, one of the main barriers to mass deployment of such 3D vision tools is the large pixel dimension, which ultimately reduces the sensor resolution and increases costs.