Live Demonstration: A Miniaturized Two-Axis Low Latency and Low-Power Sun Sensor for Attitude Determination of Sounding Rockets

Abstract

This demo shows a first prototype two-axis miniaturized spiking sun sensor. The device is composed of spiking pixels, and uses a novel Time-to-First-n-Spikes with time-out readout mode to reduce bandwidth consumption and post-processing computation. Due to on-chip processing, and compressing the angle information, the sensor produces much less data and is much faster than digital sensors. Its response latency is 88 μW, and average power consumption is 6.3 μW. An integrated circuit with core electronics was fabricated in the AMS 0.35 μm CMOS image sensor process, and was integrated inside a very small QFN64 package with micro-optics on top.