The smart vision chip has a large potential for application in general purpose high speed image processing systems. In order to fabricate smart vision chips including photo detector compactly, we have proposed the application of three dimensional LSI technology for smart vision chips. Three dimensional technology has great potential to realize new biologically inspired systems inspired by not only the biological function but also the biological structure. In this paper, we describe our three dimensional LSI technology for biologically inspired circuits and the design of smart vision chips.