Sony Semiconductor Solutions Group (a branch of Sony Corporation) is a corporate group that conducts research and development, product planning, design, production, and sales of semiconductor-related products, centering on image sensors in the imaging field such as smartphones and digital cameras, and in the sensing field such as automotive, security, and industry areas. A new R&D centre has been opened in Trento and is offering a PhD scholarship jointly with Fondazione Bruno Kessler. The objective of the collaboration within this scholarship is to study neural network architectures suitable for the integration within next generation advanced CMOS image sensors and optical sensors targeting to address the following challenges: i) fully parallel connection and processing between the top-level pixel array and the bottom layers digital processing blocks, ii) high reuse of on-chip memory and computational resources, iii) low power operation.
The doctoral candidates will have to tackle the challenges with a multidisciplinary point of view, starting from the design and simulations of ideal neural network architectures implementation, developing modelling of sensor+NN, investigating design trade-offs between computational power and chip integrability. The outcome of the research would be the result of a feasibility study and a proposed set of features/ hardware architecture which would allow the start of a development in this field. The intellectual property of the research results that will derive from the activities carried out by the doctoral student is owned by FBK and Sony.