A mammography imaging hybrid pixel sensor test chip with low-noise CMOS readout IC on fully depleted silicon-on-insulator design

Recent Design Development in Molecular Imaging for Breast Cancer Detection Using Nanometer CMOS Based Sensors

“…Based on our experience [8, 24] and existing research works [5, 7, 17, 25], it is apparent that the new technologies in CMOS image sensor designs have great potential in improving the current mammographic breast cancer detection. To be more specific, using SOI technology can provide low-noise (SNR around 87.8 db) and high-gain (30 v/v) CMOS imager.…”

“…This new architecture makes it possible to increase the fill factor (up to 100%) and to separate the photodiodes from the rest of the device electronics to reduce coupling noises [8]. …”

“…The test architecture (Figure 3) includes a charge sensitive amplifier (CSA), a discriminator, a sigma-delta analog digital converter [13], and a 14-bit counter/shift register. The last two test modules are a complete 128 × 128 photon counting array and a 128 × 128 in pixel analog-to-digital array [8]. Table 1 recorded the read-out noises for the 128 × 128 array in Figure 3.…”

“…Each photon within this window threshold has the same value. Thus, the photon counting approach has the ability to set an appropriate threshold to remove the background noise, which in turn improves the signal-to-noise ratio and the dynamic range [8, 14]. Preliminary Silvaco/Atlas P-i-N photodiode Detective Quantum Efficiency (DQE) simulation results at 50 V is in Figure 4(a).…”