12-inch-wafer-scale CMOS active-pixel sensor for digital mammography

This paper describes the development of an active-pixel sensor (APS) panel, which has a field-of-view of 23.1×17.1 cm and features 70-μm-sized pixels arranged in a 3300×2442 array format, for digital mammographic applications. The APS panel was realized on 12-inch wafers based on the standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology without physical tiling processes of several small-area sensor arrays. Electrical performance of the developed panel is described in terms of dark current, full-well capacity and leakage current map. For mammographic imaging, the optimized CsI:Tl scintillator is experimentally determined by being combined with the developed panel and analyzing im aging characteristics, such as modulation-transfer function, noise-power spectrum, detective quantum efficiency, image l ag, and contrast-detail analysis by using the CDMAM 3.4 phantom. With these results, we suggest that the developed CMOS-based detector can be used for conventional and advanced digital mammographic applications.