D. D. Coon
Department of Physics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260A. G. U. Perera
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303ABSTRACT
Spontaneous pulsing has been observed in circuits containing cryogenically cooled silicon p-i-n (p+-n-n+) diodes under dc forward bias. The intensity of infrared radiation incident on the diodes controls the pulse rate with no appreciable effect on the shape or size of the pulses. A strong similarity is noted between these properties and the nearly universal means of coding of visual information by animal photoreceptors and neural networks. It is proposed that exploitation of this remarkable analogy could lead to radically new approaches to acquisition and processing of infrared optical information. Infrared analogs of neural color coding and color vision are proposed based on analysis of p-i-n spectral response measurements. © 1986 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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