Indirect Time-of-Flight CMOS Image Sensor With On-Chip Background Light Cancelling and Pseudo-Four-Tap/Two-Tap Hybrid Imaging for Motion Artifact Suppression

This article presents a 320 × 240 indirect time-of-flight (iToF) CMOS image sensor (CIS) with on-chip motion artifact suppression and background light cancelling (BGLC). The proposed iToF CIS uses a backside-illuminated trident pinned photodiode (PPD) that assists charge transfer with a built-in lateral electric field for enhanced depth accuracy. To overcome the limitation of the conventional iToF CIS that exhibits motion artifact, we propose a pseudo-four-tap (P4-tap) demodulation method with alternate phase driving using a conventional two-tap pixel structure with a high fill factor of over 43%. In addition, by combining the advantages of both the P4-tap and conventional two-tap demodulation schemes, we propose hybrid depth imaging with reduced motion artifact for moving objects, while providing high-depth precision for the static background. For outdoor mobile applications of the iToF CIS, we integrated on-chip BGLC circuits to eliminate the BGL-induced depth error. A prototype chip is fabricated using a 90-nm backside illumination (BSI) CIS process. The BSI trident PPD enabled a low depth error of under 0.54% over the range of 0.75-4 m, with a modulation frequency of 100 MHz. Motion artifact was suppressed at 60 frames/s of hybrid depth imaging owing to the proposed P4-tap scheme. With the on-chip BGLC circuit, the experimental results demonstrate a 0.55% depth error at a 1-m distance, even under 120-klx BGL illumination.