Experimental results from 32 x 32 CMOS photogate and photodiode active pixel image sensors

In this paper we present results from measurements on a recently developed CMOS integrated circuit containing three Active Pixel Image Sensors (APS) with 32 X 32 pixels. The chip has been developed using a standard CMOS DLP/DLM 1.2 micrometers process line from Austria Micro Systems. Two of the APS image sensors use photogate pixels and the third uses photodiodes. A series of measurements, including quantum efficiency, conversion gain, read noise, fixed pattern noise, linearity, uniformity and dark current rates, have been carried out in order to compare the detector performance between CMOS-APS photodiode and photogate pixels. The obtained results confirm that APS detector performance is comparable to Charge-coupled devices.