Design considerations for a low-noise CMOS image sensor

This paper reports a Low-Noise CMOS Image Sensor. Low-noise operation is achieved owing to the combination of a noise-enhanced pixel, the use of a two-step ADC architecture and the analysis, and the optimization thereof, of the noise contributed by the readout channel. The paper basically gathers the sensor architecture, the ADC converter architecture, the outcome of the noise analysis and some basic characterization data. The general low-noise design framework is discussed in the companion presentation.