1mW Always-On Imaging

1mW always-on imaging becomes quite a popular topic. TinyML Summit held in Sunnyvale, CA on March 20-21, has a number of presentations on that.

Pixart presents its approach to the low power CIS:

Qualcomm presents its view on "Ultra-low Power Always-On Computer Vision:"

"The CVM is built on a custom ASIC, which is a 28nm ultra-low-power ARM-based SoC featuring a control processor, a DSP-like hardware accelerator, a dedicated vision processor, and embedded PMU. It also incorporates a lower-power QVGA CMOS grayscale image sensor and a custom-designed wide field-of-view lens. The image sensor is sensitive to near-IR wavelengths, and can be used for low-light scenarios with IR illumination. The entire CVM, including the image sensor and the ASIC, consumes less than 1 mW power while actively performing computer vision tasks such as object detection."