Abstract
Recent activity in photon counting CMOS image sensors (CIS) has been directed to reduction of read noise. Many approaches and methods have been reported. This work is focused on providing sub 1 e− read noise by design and operation of the binary and small signal readout of photon counting CIS. Compensation of transfer gate feed-through was used to provide substantially reduced CDS time and source follower (SF) bandwidth. SF read noise was reduced by a factor of 3 with this method. This method can be applied broadly to CIS devices to reduce the read noise for small signals to enable use as a photon counting sensor.
Highlights
In the past several years there has been a substantial amount of work directed to the use of CMOS Image Sensors (CIS) for single photon detection and photon counting [1,2,3,4,5]
The maximum voltage swing for readout is much lower for a photon counting CIS device than that of a conventional CIS device
We have experimentally shown that reduced CDS time and dominant time constant of the source follower (SF) readout can provide significant read noise reduction
Summary
Recent work on CIS read noise reduction has been directed to increasing conversion gain (CG) [6,7,8,9], correlated multiple sampling (CMS) [9,10], source follower (SF) transistor structure [11], and SF accumulation [12]. Sub 1 erms read noise was achieved with results in the range of 0.28 erms to 0.86 erms
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