R 45 : A 300 mm Wafer-Size CMOS Image Sensor for Low-Light-Level Imaging

In this paper, we describe the architecture of a wafer size CMOS image sensor with on-chip RGB color filter enabling to enlarge the size of the large format sensor while maintaining good signal quality. This sensor has programmable in-pixel voltage gain amplifier and column level differential readout circuitry. A 202×205mm 2 , 1.6Mpixel, 100fps CMOS image sensor is fabricated on a 300mm wafer in 0.25μm 1P3M CMOS. The diagonal of the sensor is 1.5× larger than that of the conventional wafer-size imager on a 200mm wafer. In addition, the differential readout circuitry on the column signal path ensures tolerance to common mode noise and the drift of power/ground voltage.