An Analog VLSI Saccadic Eye Movement System

In an effort to understand saccadic eye movements and their relation tovisual attention and other forms of eye movements, we - in collaboration with a number of other laboratories - are carrying outa large-scale effort to design and build a complete primate oculomotor system using analog CMOS VLSI technology. Using this technology, a low power, compact, multi-chip system has been built which works in real-time using real-world visual inputs. We describe in this paper the performance of an early version of such a system including a 1-D array of photoreceptors mimicking the retina, a circuit computing the mean location of activity representing thesuperior colliculus, a saccadic burst generator, and a one degree-of-freedom rotational platform which models the dynamic properties of the primate oculomotor plant. 1 Introduction When we look around our environment, we move our eyes to center and stabilize objects of interest onto our fovea. In order to achieve this, our eyes move in quick jumps with short pauses in between. These quick jumps (up to 750 deg/sec in humans) areknown as saccades and are seen in both exploratory eye movements and as reflexive eye movements in response to sudden visual, auditory, or somatosensory stimuli.Since the intent of the saccade is to bring new objects of interest onto the fovea, it can be considered a primitive attentional mechanism.