This brief presents a 32-stage CMOS time delay integration image sensor with on-chip column parallel analog accumulator. Temporal oversampling technique is applied in the sensor to realize synchronous signal capturing. A column parallel analog accumulator with layout size of 0.09 mm 2 is integrated at both sides of pixel array. Through adopting input-offset storing technique, a column fixed pattern noise because of the amplifier's offset variations is reduced by the accumulator. The accumulator also acts as a pixel noise canceller. The fabricated chip in 0.18-μm one-poly four-metal 1.8/3.3-V CMOS technology achieves the maximum line rate of 3875 lines/s. The measured signal-to-noise ratio of the fabricated sensor is improved on average by 11.9 dB at 16 stages and 14.2 dB at 32 stages. The presented sensor is suitable for application in low illumination, high scanning speed, and remote sensing systems.
Index Terms-Analog accumulator, CMOS image sensors, readout circuits, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), time delay integration (TDI).
1063-8210
In order to eliminate the fixed-pattern noise (FPN) in the output image of time-delay-integration CMOS image sensor (TDI-CIS), a FPN correction method based on gray value compensation is proposed. One hundred images are first captured under uniform illumination. Then, row FPN (RFPN) and column FPN (CFPN) are estimated based on the row-mean vector and column-mean vector of all collected images, respectively. Finally, RFPN are corrected by adding the estimated RFPN gray value to the original gray values of pixels in the corresponding row, and CFPN are corrected by subtracting the estimated CFPN gray value from the original gray values of pixels in the corresponding column. Experimental results based on a 128-stage TDI-CIS show that, after correcting the FPN in the image captured under uniform illumination with the proposed method, the standard-deviation of row-mean vector decreases from 5.6798 to 0.4214 LSB, and the standard-deviation of column-mean vector decreases from 15.2080 to 13.4623 LSB. Both kinds of FPN in the real images captured by TDI-CIS are eliminated effectively with the proposed method.
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