Title
A 12 pJ/Pixel Analog-to-Information Converter Based 816 × 640 Pixel CMOS Image Sensor
Abstract
Analog-to-information converters (AICs) take advantage of the limited information bandwidth in high-frequency signals to improve the energy efficiency of front-end data converters. High-resolution image sensors often convey limited information due to the spatial redundancy between neighboring pixels. This paper proposes a mixed-signal AIC which compresses each nonoverlapping 4 × 4 pixel block in a 816 × 640 pixel prototype active-pixel sensor (APS) imager. It combines an energy-efficient charge-pump bit-image processor (BIP) with an area-efficient successive-approximation-register-single-slope (SAR-SS) hybrid analog-to-digital converter (ADC) via a charge-transfer-amplifier (CTA). The AIC is fully dynamic and consumes no static power. The ADC's capacitor array doubles as a computational device for parts of the compression algorithm which reduces its sampling rate by a factor of four. The compressed data contains direct edge information and can be decoded by a very simple receiver. The fabricated prototype consumes 12 pJ per pixel at 111 fps in the image compression mode and 48 pJ per pixel at 28.7 fps in raw data mode (9 b per pixel) under the same clock rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most energy-efficient compressive CMOS image sensor ever reported in the literature, thanks to the proposed AIC.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/JSSC.2014.2307063
Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of  
Keywords
Field
DocType
CMOS image sensors,amplifiers,analogue-digital conversion,approximation theory,capacitors,charge pump circuits,data compression,decoding,image coding,image resolution,image sampling,sensor arrays,ADC,APS imager,BIP,CTA,SAR-SS,active-pixel sensor imager,analog-to-information converter,area-efficient successive-approximation-register-single-slope,capacitor array,charge-transfer-amplifier,energy-efficient charge-pump bit-image processor,energy-efficient compressive CMOS image sensor,front-end data converter,hybrid analog-to-digital converter,image compression mode,image resolution,mixed-signal AIC,spatial redundancy,Analog-to-information converter (AIC),CMOS image sensor,SAR ADC,charge transfer amplifier,compressive sensing,image compression
Image sensor,Computer science,Sampling (signal processing),Electronic engineering,Pixel,Data compression,Image resolution,Pixel aspect ratio,Image compression,Clock rate
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
49
5
0018-9200
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.51
28
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Denis Guangyin Chen1676.23
Fang Tang2221.33
Man Kay Law39011.78
Amine Bermak449390.25