3DJAM: A linear CMOS sensor for 3D vision with merged I-TOF and OT techniques

3DJAM is a novel 3D image sensor, implemented with a 3.3V, 0.35μm CMOS technology, that combines the Optical Triangulation (OT) and the Indirect Time of Flight (ITOF) techniques in a single chip for range finding scanners. It has been designed to cover very large depth scenes (up to 20 meters), achieving sub-millimeter resolution over the OT range (below 2 meters), working with a single pulsed laser source and also taking advantage of ambient light removal. The chip embeds also a programmable logic unit, which supervises over all the internal functions (like timing, pipelining, data transfer), a power supply unit (for both the analogue and the digital subsystems) and an analogue output buffer that can drive an external ADC for data acquisition © 2006 IEEE.