A 1.5-V 550-/spl mu/W 176/spl times/144 autonomous CMOS active pixel image sensor

This paper addresses the development of a micropower 176/spl times/144 CMOS active pixel image sensor that dissipates one to two orders of magnitude less power than current state-of-the-art CMOS image sensors. The chip operates from a 1.5-V voltage source and the power consumption measured for the chip running from an internal 25.2-MHz clock yielding 30 frames per second is about 550 /spl mu/W. This amount enables the sensor to run from a watch battery. In order to achieve design goals, a low-power sensor design methodology is applied throughout the design process from system-level to process-level, while realizing the performance to satisfy the design specification. As an autonomous sensor, it can be operated with only three pads [GND, VDD (1.2-1.7 V), DATAOUT]. The die occupies 4 mm/sup 2/ of silicon.     

A 9-V/Lux-s 5000-frames/s 512/spl times/512 CMOS sensor

A high-responsivity 9-V/Lux-s high-speed 5000-frames/s (at full 512/spl times/512 resolution) CMOS active pixel sensor (APS) is presented in this paper. The sensor was designed for a 0.35-/spl mu/m 2P3M CMOS sensor process and utilizes a five-transistor pixel to provide a true parallel shutter. Column-parallel analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture yields fast readout from pixels and digitization of the data simultaneously with acquiring a new frame. The chip has a two-row SRAM to store data from the ADC and read previous rows of data out of the chip. There are a total of 16 parallel ports operating up to 90 MHz delivering /spl sim/1.3 Gpixel/s or 13 Gb/s of data at the maximum rate. In conclusion, a comparison between two high-speed digital CMOS sensor architectures, which are a column-parallel APS and a digital pixel sensor (DPS), is conducted.     

A high-speed, 240-frames/s, 4.1-Mpixel CMOS sensor

This paper describes a large-format 4-Mpixel (2352/spl times/1728) sensor with on-chip parallel 10-b analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The chip size is 20/spl times/20 mm with a 7-/spl mu/m pixel pitch. At a 66-MHz master clock rate and 3.3-V operating voltage, it achieves a high frame rate of 240 frames/s delivering 9.75 Gb/s of data with power dissipation of less than 700 mW. The principal architectural features of the sensor are discussed along with the results of sensor characterization.