Agenda

Seminar, Prof. Tobi Delbruck

• Monday, 1 September 2025
• 10:30-11:30
• EEMCS, HB 17.140

Silicon Retina Event Camera Design

Event cameras are vision sensors that mimic biology’s activity-driven digital output. They offer a unique combination of low latency, high dynamic range, and sparse output that makes them attractive candidates for embedded vision systems that face the power-latency tradeoff of conventional frame cameras. After a brief historical introduction to the 50-year history of silicon retina development, this talk will mainly be about event camera pixel design at the transistor level and camera design at the board and software level.
There are many interesting circuit design aspects of event camera pixels which endow them with quick responses even under low lighting, precise threshold matching even with big transistor mismatch, and temperature-independent event threshold. These chips also require critical biasing and readout circuits that I will briefly review, along with a complex stack of logic, firmware, and software that I will also briefly review. I hope to conclude with a live demo of some of the most interesting functional characteristics of these cameras.

Bio

Tobi Delbruck received the B.Sc. degree in physics from the University of California in 1986 and PhD degree from Caltech in 1993 as the first student with the newly-established CNS program, with main PhD supervisor Carver Mead. He is an ETH Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, and has a position with the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, where he has been since 1998. The Sensors group that he co-directs together with Prof. Shih-Chii Liu works on a broad range of topics covering device physics to computer vision and control, with a theme of efficient neuromorphic sensory processing and deep neural network theory and hardware accelerators.