Fault Tolerant Photodiode and Photogate Active Pixel Sensors

نویسندگان

  • Cory Jung
  • Glenn H. Chapman
  • Michelle L. La Haye
  • Sunjaya Djaja
  • Desmond Y.H. Cheung
  • Henry Lin
  • Edward Loo
  • Yves Audet
چکیده

As the pixel counts of digital imagers increase, the challenge of maintaining high yields and ensuring reliability over an imager’s lifetime increases. A fault tolerant active pixel sensor (APS) has been designed to meet this need by splitting an APS in half and operating both halves in parallel. The fault tolerant APS will perform normally in the no defect case and will produce approximately half the output for single defects. Thus, the entire signal can be recovered by multiplying the output by two. Since pixels containing multiple defects are rare, this design can correct for most defects allowing for higher production yields. Fault tolerant photodiode and photogate APS’ were fabricated in 0.18-micron technology. Testing showed that the photodiode APS could correct for optically induced and electrically induced faults, within experimental error. The photogate APS was only tested for optically induced defects and also corrects for defects within experimental error. Further testing showed that the sensitivity of fault tolerant pixels was approximately 2-3 times more sensitive than the normal pixels. HSpice simulations of the fault tolerant APS circuit did not show increased sensitivity, however an equivalent normal APS circuit with twice width readout and row transistors was 1.90 times more sensitive than a normal pixel.

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تاریخ انتشار 2005