Title
A Dynamic Range Enhanced Readout Technique with a Two-Step TDC for High Speed Linear CMOS Image Sensors.
Abstract
This paper presents a dynamic range (DR) enhanced readout technique with a two-step time-to-digital converter (TDC) for high speed linear CMOS image sensors. A multi-capacitor and self-regulated capacitive trans-impedance amplifier (CTIA) structure is employed to extend the dynamic range. The gain of the CTIA is auto adjusted by switching different capacitors to the integration node asynchronously according to the output voltage. A column-parallel ADC based on a two-step TDC is utilized to improve the conversion rate. The conversion is divided into coarse phase and fine phase. An error calibration scheme is also proposed to correct quantization errors caused by propagation delay skew within -T-clk similar to+T-clk. A linear CMOS image sensor pixel array is designed in the 0.13 m CMOS process to verify this DR-enhanced high speed readout technique. The post simulation results indicate that the dynamic range of readout circuit is 99.02 dB and the ADC achieves 60.22 dB SNDR and 9.71 bit ENOB at a conversion rate of 2 MS/s after calibration, with 14.04 dB and 2.4 bit improvement, compared with SNDR and ENOB of that without calibration.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.3390/s151128224
SENSORS
Keywords
Field
DocType
CMOS image sensor,CTIA,wide dynamic range,two-step TDC,error calibration
Wide dynamic range,Dynamic range,Capacitor,Image sensor,Propagation delay,Electronic engineering,Effective number of bits,CMOS,Engineering,Amplifier
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
15
11.0
1424-8220
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
14
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhiyuan Gao1179.39
Congjie Yang210.35
Jiangtao Xu37418.98
Kaiming Nie4358.77