MEMS-Based Diagnostics for Turbulent Shear Flows.

The objective of this section of the research is to develop hardware for fast processing of charge coupled display CCD images. This hardware will take digital CCD output and process it at the same output data rate of the CCD. The result is processed images at the maximum rate possible with a CCD camera. In particular, the hardware will perform convolutions of the input images with a digitally stored convolution kernal matrix, such as are needed for image spatial filtering and neural networks. A hardware test chip has been completed, characterized, and has been used to process images. This chip does not contain the digital front end necessary to connect directly to a CCD data stream but does demonstrate all of the critical analog components of the image processor. The test chip will be integrated with a shift register in a later chip fabrication to produce a fully functional image processor chip capable of connection to the data stream directly output from a CCD or similar row-wise serial output imaging device.