Title
Detecting SEUs in Noisy Digital Imagers with small pixels
Abstract
Camera sensors are susceptible to the same transient (non-permanent) errors that occur in standard digital semiconductors, known as Single Event Upsets (SEUs). These result from the charge deposited by cosmic ray particles on the semiconductor. In a camera sensor, SEUs manifest themselves as one or more brighter pixels in a dark-frame image during long exposure times. Since the value of brighter pixels is related directly to the deposited charge, SEU analysis of digital imagers provides essential information about the nature and amount of charge deposited by particle hits, their occurrence rate, and the charge spread area. In this paper we describe an experimental approach to collect this information from pixels of size of 7μm (DSLR cameras) down to 1.2μm (cell phone cameras). High gain (ISO) images allow us to detect lower energy SEUs but at the cost of a noisier background. The smaller pixels (1.2μm) are more sensitive to lower energy SEUs, but have considerably noisier background levels. It is important to observe the SEU information over a range of gains (ISOs) and pixel sizes, to obtain the energy and spatial distribution of the SEUs, which is valuable for understanding the nature of SEUs in other circuits. The problem is that SEUs, by their transient nature, appear randomly in both time and location in a series of images. It is important to separate those from the noisy imager random excursions above the background level. We implement a new algorithm that is more effective in separating SEUs from random noise by leveraging thousands of images to obtain the noise distribution of each individual pixel.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/DFT.2019.8875486
2019 IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT)
Keywords
Field
DocType
dark-frame image,DSLR cameras,cell phone cameras,high gain images,pixel sizes,noisy imager random excursions,noisy digital imagers,camera sensor,standard digital semiconductors,cosmic ray particles,lower energy SEU,single event upsets,ISO,spatial distribution,noise distribution,random noise,size 1.2 mum,size 7.0 mum
Cosmic ray,High-gain antenna,Image sensor,Computer science,Random noise,Optics,Digital image,Real-time computing,Pixel,Electronic circuit,Integrated circuit
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1550-5774
978-1-7281-2261-8
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
4
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Glenn H. Chapman116734.10
Rohan Thomas271.79
Klinsmann J. Coelho Silva Meneses371.45
Bifei Huang410.37
Hao Yang510.37
Israel Koren61579175.07
Zahava Koren723936.02