This imager crosses the bridge between highly sensitive lowlight
CIS and conventional imagers. It demonstrates the efficiency
of the proposed design level noise reduction technique
that can be easily combined with the process optimizations
mentioned above for even more noise reduction.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II reviews the
low noise CIS readout chain architecture and noise sources.
In Section III, the noise reduction mechanism is recalled.
Section IV presents the overall architecture of the imager
as well as the most important blocks. Section V details the
test and characterization of the proposed imager, presents
the experimental setup, the measurement method and results.
Section VI discusses the measurement results.