A Global Shutter High Speed TDI CMOS Image Sensor With Pipelined Charge Transfer Pixel

In this paper, a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$120\,\times \, 45$ </tex-math></inline-formula> global shutter high speed time delay integration (TDI) CMOS image sensor with pipelined charge transfer pixel (PCT-pixel) is presented. Offset free and low noise pipelined signal accumulation are achieved by the PCT-pixel, and a novel layout is also proposed to increase the equivalent photosensitive area’s fill factor of the proposed pixel. Due to the parallelism of the proposed PCT-pixel, global shutter exposure method is applied in this sensor, which can eliminate nonsynchronous signal capturing problem. The proposed TDI sensor is implemented in a 0.11-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> one-poly three-metal CMOS image sensor technology with a line rate of 100 KHz, a PCT-pixel size of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$30\,\times \, 15 \,\,\mu \text{m}^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, and a fill factor of 43.5%. Measurement results show that the sensor can achieve a maximum sensitivity of 95 V/lux<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\,\times \, $ </tex-math></inline-formula>sec and an energy consumption of 0.12 nJ/pixel. Measured signal-to-noise ratio boost value follows theoretical value well. The proposed sensor has the potential to achieve high scanning speed and high TDI stage while costing less power and silicon area.

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