Title
Experimental study and analysis of soft and permanent errors in digital cameras
Abstract
Digital cameras, like other digital circuits, experience hits by high-energy cosmic particles. In regular digital circuits, if the charge deposited by a particle hit happens to change the state of a flip-flop, the circuit will suffer a short lived error that is often called a soft error or a single event upset (SEU). If, on the other hand, the deposited charge propagates through the circuit without causing a state error, there will be no indication that such a hit ever occurred. The latter is often called a single event transient (SET). In contrast to other ICs, the CMOS Active Pixel Sensor (APS) in a digital camera can record the effect of most particle hits by displaying a pixel output that is brighter than the incoming illumination. Although in regular ICs particle hits rarely cause permanent damage, permanent defects in digital camera pixels, caused by cosmic particles, are very often observed in practice. This paper presents an experimental study of SEUs in digital cameras and compares their rate to that of SEUs in SRAM memory and to the rate of permanent defects in cameras. The analysis of SEUs in digital cameras can provide important information about the nature and distribution of particle hits and their occurrence rate, about the development of permanent defective pixels (also called “hot pixels”), and increase our understanding of SEUs in regular ICs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/DFT.2016.7684061
2016 IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Active pixel sensor (APS),single event transients (SETs),single event upsets (SEUs),hot pixels
Digital electronics,Soft error,Computer science,Electronic engineering,Real-time computing,Static random-access memory,Digital image,Digital camera,Pixel,Single event upset,Integrated circuit
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5090-3624-0
0
0.34
References 
Authors
4
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Glenn H. Chapman116734.10
Rahul Thomas240.96
Rohan Thomas371.79
Israel Koren41579175.07
Zahava Koren523936.02