320×240 oversampled digital single photon counting image sensor

Abstract

A 320x240 single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) based single photon counting image sensor is implemented in O.13flm imaging CMOS with state of the art 8flm pixel pitch at 26.8% fill factor. The imager is demonstrated operating as a global shutter (GS) oversampled binary image sensor reading out at 5.14kFPS. Frames are accumulated in real time on FPGA to construct a 256 photon/8bit output image at 20FPS.

Smart-aggregation imaging for single molecule localisation with SPAD cameras

“…The SPAD sensor explored here (labelled SPCImager) is a 320 × 240 resolution imager featuring an 8 μm pixel pitch at 26.8% fill factor, and a peak photon detection probability of 35% at 450 nm15. When operated in binary mode, bit-planes are captured at a rate of 10 kfps.…”

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor Image Sensor Using a Gate/Body-Tied P-Channel Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor-Type Photodetector for High-Speed Binary Operation

“…(8) However, the image sensor proposed in this paper is more effective for high image resolution since it has a smaller pixel size than the SPAD, which is based on a deep n-well layer. Moreover, high voltage, which is required for SPAD, is not required in the proposed image sensor.…”

Images from Bits: Non-Iterative Image Reconstruction for Quanta Image Sensors

“…A similar idea to QIS was developed a few years later by EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland), known as the Gigavision camera [11,12,13]. In the past few years, research groups at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, UK) [14,15,16], as well as EPFL [17,18] have made new progresses in QIS using binary single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras. In the industry, Rambus Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) is developing binary image sensors for high dynamic range imaging [19,20,21].…”

“…Since the binary response is generated as soon as the number of photons exceeds the threshold, QIS can be operated at very high speed. For example, using single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD), one can achieve 10k frames per second with a spatial resolution of $320\times 240$ pixels [14] or even 156k frames per second with a spatial resolution of $512\times 128$ pixels [17]. For a higher spatial resolution, Massondian et al [9] reports a QIS operating at 1000 frames per second for a spatial resolution of $1376\times 768$ pixels.…”