Paper
26 April 2008 Performances of a solid streak camera in standard CMOS technology with nanosecond time resolution
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The classical streak cameras use a vacuum tube making thus fragile, cumbersome and expensive. The FAst MOS Imager (FAMOSI) project consists in reproducing completely this streak camera functionality with a single CMOS chip. The advantages of on-chip functionalities lead to a power reduction, a lower cost and miniaturization. In this paper, we show the capabilities of a prototype fabricated in the AMS 0.35 μm CMOS process. The chip is composed of 64 columns per 64 rows of pixels. The pixels have a size of 20 μm per 20 μm and a fill factor of 47 %. The Chip FAMOSI implements an electronic shutter and an analog accumulation capability inside the pixel. With this pixel architecture, the sensor can work in single shot mode when the light pulse power is sufficient and in repetitive mode, i.e. it can measure a recurrent light pulse and accumulates the successive photo charges into an internal node, for low light pulse detection. This repetitive mode utilizes an analog accumulation in order to improve the sensitivity and the signal to noise ratio of the system. Characterizations under static and uniform illumination in single shot mode have been done in order to evaluate the performances of the detector. The main noises levels have been evaluated and the experiments show that a conversion gain of 4.8 μV/e- is obtained with a dynamic range of 1.2V. Moreover, the charge transfer characterization in single shot mode has been realized. It permits to know which potential must be apply to the charge spill transistor to obtain the whole dynamic of the output with a maximal transfer gain, what is primordial to optimize the analog accumulation. Finally, the dynamic operation of the sensors is exposed. Measurements show a sample time of 715 ps and a time resolution better than 2 ns. A 6 ns light pulse has been measured in single shot and in accumulation mode.
© (2008) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Frédéric Morel, Chantal-Virginie Zint, Wilfried Uhring, and Jean-Pierre Le Normand "Performances of a solid streak camera in standard CMOS technology with nanosecond time resolution", Proc. SPIE 7003, Optical Sensors 2008, 70030G (26 April 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.780439
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KEYWORDS
Photodiodes

Transistors

Analog electronics

Streak cameras

Sensors

Imaging systems

CMOS technology

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