Monday, April 13, 2009

Image Sensors on VLSI Circuits Symposium

This year VLSI Circuits Symposium has an image sensor session to be held on June 17 in Kyoto, Japan. The session features a couple of papers on very low voltage and low power sensors and also TI-sponsored research papers on WRGB and HDR sensors:

A Color-Independent Saturation, Linear Response, Wide Dynamic Range CMOS Image Sensor With Retinal Rod-and Cone-Like Color Pixels
S. Kawada, S. Sakai, N. Akahane, K. Mizobuchi and S. Sugawa
Tohoku University and Texas Instruments, Japan

A CMOS image sensor densely and uniformly placed the retinal rod- and cones-like WRGB pixels with lateral overflow integration capacitors having the different sizes in each color has been demonstrated. A 1/3.3-inch, 4.2-um effective pitch, 1280(H) x 480(V) checker-pattern pixels CMOS image sensor was fabricated and has achieved color-independent saturation and about twice the effective sensitivity compared with conventional Bayer-RGB color filter image sensor made at the same time.

A CMOS Image Sensor With 2.5-e– Random Noise and 110-ke– Full Well Capacity Using Column Source Follower Readout Circuits
T. Kohara, W. Lee, N. Akahane, K. Mizobuchi and S. Sugawa
Tohoku University and Texas Instruments, Japan

A low noise CMOS image sensor without degradation of saturation performance has been developed by using column amplifiers of the gains of about 1.0 in a lateral overflow integration capacitor technology. The 1/4-inch, 4.5-um pitch, 800(H) x 600(V) pixels CMOS image sensor fabricated by a 0.18-um 2P3M technology has achieved fully linear response, 0.98 column readout gain, 100-uV/e- conversion gain, 2.5-e- random noise, 110,000-e- full well capacity and 93-dB dynamic range in one exposure.

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